ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 8, 1996 TAG: 9607080118
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
The Clinton administration has sharply increased use of federal telephone wiretaps and other electronic surveillance in the United States since taking office, and official estimates foresee that the growth will continue in coming years.
The expansion has been driven in large part by stepped-up use of electronic eavesdropping against narcotics traffickers. In addition, a substantial rise in spending on federal law enforcement has overridden the chief constraint on use of wiretaps - their relatively high cost.
Civil rights and privacy advocates are unhappy with the trend, but have been able to do little in the face of bipartisan support in Congress for more extensive use of wiretaps and room bugs.
While federal electronic surveillance has been expanding for more than a decade, the trend has accelerated under the Clinton administration. Last year marked the first time federal courts approved more wiretaps than all state courts combined.
``We are up 30 to 40 percent this year,'' said Frederick Hess, who runs the Justice Department office that approves applications for court-ordered wiretaps. This maintains the pace set in 1993, when the number of federal surveillance orders rose 32 percent.
In 1992, the last year of the Bush administration, there were 340 federal court orders permitting electronic surveillance in criminal cases. That number rose to 672 last year, officials say, and the total for 1996 almost certainly will rise above 700.
Those figures do not include ``national security'' wiretap orders, obtained under intelligence legislation, which also have been rising dramatically.
Preparing for expected continued growth in surveillance of domestic criminals, the Justice Department is buying additional high-tech equipment, developing new eavesdropping techniques and adding support personnel.
Twenty-eight years after Congress opened the door to wiretapping with a narrowly drawn statute, electronic surveillance has become so routine that it has been years since a federal district court judge turned down a prosecutor's application for a wiretap order, according to the 1995 Wiretap Report issued by the administrative office of the U.S. Courts.
The acceleration of wiretapping during the Clinton administration stems in part from Attorney General Janet Reno's decision to accept recommendations of career narcotics supervisors in the Justice Department's Criminal Division, who strongly back electronic surveillance as a particularly effective tool in the drug war.
A recent case, code-named Zorro II, shows why their tactics are driving up the numbers. Investigators strung up more than 90 separate wiretaps in cities including Seattle, San Diego, Miami and New York as they built cases against 130 suspected cocaine importers, shippers and distributors. ``It was totally based on wiretaps,'' said Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. ``We brought down an entire organization.''
A second growth factor is the fast buildup of federal law enforcement generally, in which hundreds of prosecutors, agents and support personnel have been added nationwide. The FBI's budget has grown 53 percent since 1993, while the Drug Enforcement Administration's budget has jumped 33 percent. Both agencies are asking for large budget increases in fiscal 1997.
This new funding has been a factor in making increased use of electronic surveillance possible. Federal wiretaps cost more than $70,000 a month to operate and generate hundreds of hours of labor for monitors, transcribers, surveillance teams and investigators. Larger budgets mean cost is less of an obstacle.
Building for the future, the DEA is carrying out a $33 million program to replace single-line wiretapping gear with new equipment that can monitor 40 lines simultaneously and process the intercepts by computer. The FBI is plowing millions into developing new intercept techniques for digital lines and expanding its cadre of agents who use the bureau's high-tech surveillance gear.
``I don't think J. Edgar Hoover would contemplate what we can do today in terms of technology,'' Reno testified during a Senate hearing in May.
The total number of federal wiretaps is just one measure of the rise in federal surveillance. The buildup also is evident in the increased use of electronic devices that record the numbers dialed by a target telephone, and the origin of calls to it.
These devices allow agents to identify a person's associates. Beginning in 1993, Justice agencies began using the court-authorized monitors more often and leaving them installed for longer periods of time, according to a Justice Department report.
For civil rights advocates, the principal battle against federal electronic surveillance was lost back in 1968, and they have not done much better since then, because of congressional support for wiretapping.
In 1967, the Supreme Court declared phone conversations were protected by the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. The following year, however, Congress passed a statute that permitted limited use of electronic surveillance of organized crime and gambling groups. Since then, in response to public outrage over crime, Congress has added to the list of crimes that could be investigated with wiretaps.
Federal wiretapping ``is clearly an invasion of the privacy rights of Americans and [infringes on] the Fourth Amendment,'' said Donald Haines, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. He cited Justice Department opinion polls that show more than 70 percent of the U.S. population disapproves of wiretapping.
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