Gap Between Wiretaps Reported By US Courts And Recipient Service Providers Continues To Grow

"Albert Gidari of Just Security/Center for Internet and Society has been looking into the US Courts' wiretap reports for 2014 and 2015. The problem with these reports is that nothing adds up. As he wrote for Just Security last year, there's a huge discrepancy between the numbers reported by the US Courts Administrative Office and those reported by the service providers complying with the orders.

These numbers should be much closer than they are. If a wiretap is issued by a court, then the recipient service provider should report being served with one wiretap order. But that's not what has happened. The US Courts AO reported 3,554 federal and state wiretap orders in 2014. Service providers, however, reported receiving 10,712 wiretap orders for that same year.

As Gidari pointed out in 2015 (examining the 2014 wiretap report), there's not much that explains this discrepancy.

The Wiretap Report says “1,532 extensions were requested and authorized in 2014, a decrease of 28 percent.” So even if half of the carrier reported orders were extended once and then treated as separate orders in the carriers’ transparency reports (the Wiretap Report would treat an extended order a single order), the numbers are still off by more than two­fold.

The same goes for orders that expired after the end of the reporting period. As Gidari notes, anything not counted by the courts the previous year would show up on next year's report and be negated by the lack of a new order on service providers' reports."