Wiretapping

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Wiretapping By The Government is Strictly Regulated

When it comes to secretly eavesdropping on your conversations — whether you're talking in private or public, on the phone or face to face, by email or by instant messenger — no one's got better funding, equipment or experience than the government. They are capable of "bugging" you by using tiny hidden microphones that they've installed in your home, office, or anywhere else that you have private conversations. They can also bug you from long distances or through windows using high-powered microphones, or even laser microphones that can hear what you say by sensing the vibrations of your voice on the window's glass. They can put a "wire" or a small hidden microphone on an informant or undercover police officer to record their conversations with other people. Or they can conduct a "wiretap," where they tap into your phone or computer communications.

Use of these investigative techniques is regulated by very strong laws that protect the privacy of your communications against any eavesdropper, including law enforcement, and we'll describe those below. (Another set of laws regulating surveillance for foreign intelligence and national security purposes will be discussed later[создать].)

However, it's important to note at the outset that the government has been known to break these laws and spy on communications without going to a judge first, usually in the name of national security. Indeed, as was first revealed in December 2005, since 9/11 the National Security Agency (NSA) has been conducting a massive and illegal program to wiretap the phone calls and emails of millions of ordinary Americans without warrants, hoping to discover terrorists by sifting through the mounds of data using computers (for more details, see EFF's NSA Spying page and the Beyond FISA[создать] section of this guide).

One might hope that the information collected as part of the NSA's dragnet surveillance will only be used against real terrorists, but there's no guarantee, particularly when there's no court oversight. And we don't have any hard data about how the NSA actually uses that information, with whom it is shared, or how long it is stored. So, although communications that have been illegally wiretapped by the NSA are unlikely to be used against you in a criminal trial — the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule[создать] would likely disallow it — there's no knowing whether it might be used against you in the future in some other way.

Therefore, regardless of the strengths of the laws described below, you should consider wiretapping to be a high risk, unless and until the NSA program is stopped by Congressional action or a successful lawsuit. EFF is currently suing the government and the individual officials responsible for the NSA program (see http://www.eff.org/cases/jewel), as well as AT&T, one of the companies assisting in the illegal surveillance (see http://www.eff.org/nsa/hepting), to try and stop the surveillance.

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