It's worth realizing that, before computerized central offices, telephone wiretapping required running physical wires. Back when Rudi Giuliani was prosecuting organized time, not only did physical wires have to be run, the cops were billed for them as expensive private lines. His task force was spending about a million dollars a year with New York Telephone on wiretapping. In one case, law enforcement didn't pay their bill, resulting in the person being wiretapped having the wiretap connection show up on their bill, blowing the case.
That resulted in the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, which mandated that central offices offer remote wiretapping. Capacity up to 1% of lines is required.
Back in the electromechanical era, the only call data that could be collected was outgoing dial pulses, using a "pen register".[1] (The one shown in Wikipedia is mine. It's a beautiful piece of antique brass telegraph technology. It records dial pulses as dashes, and has to be wound up like a clock, with a big brass key.) The Supreme Court decision allowing "pen registers" without a warrant refers to these "extremely limited" devices. That definition has been stretched and stretched by law enforcement into all non-voice data collected by telcos.
Law enforcement still wants more.
> In one case, law enforcement didn't pay their bill, resulting in the person being wiretapped having the wiretap connection show up on their bill, blowing the case.
In the fictional world of The Wire, one of the "wires" were blown when the guy checked on his mobile bill to find out his account was flagged to not be disconnected. I'm sure this was art imitating life or inspired by type of thing
The Wire is allegedly one of the more realistic crime shows in how incompetent it portrays the police.
It was created by a journalist and a cop, who both had long careers in Baltimore before working on the show. Not surprising how realistic it is. (Also a beautiful work of art beyond the realism.) If you find the show interesting, David Simon's book "Homicide" is a great read.
And a few of his other series, such as Treme, The Deuce, and Generation Kill are all fantastic.
In their defense their target was amazingly adept.
Many criminals even today don't engage in basic counter measures like you see on that show.
And I'd call them "dysfunctional" more than inept. Bad leadership stymied by political goals overcomes even good policing.
You’re doing my boy McNulty dirty.
That, and the alcoholism
Never watched the wire...but I remember back 25+ years ago some people joking about not paying their phone bill to see if the phone was tapped.
They claimed that since it never got shut off when they didn't pay it must be tapped.
Possibly correct I suppose...
The cost dynamics have flipped in the past decades. What we have now is "Surveillance Too Cheap to Meter" https://cacm.acm.org/practice/surveillance-too-cheap-to-mete... Because storing data is cheaper and often economically more useful than not storing it.
With the price of memory skyrocketing, maybe that equation changes slightly.
> The one shown in Wikipedia is mine.
neat!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Pen_Regi...
assuming you still have it, it wouldn't be the worst idea to update the pic to something without chromatic aberration and motion blur. the wiki pic is probably the worst of the bunch compared to others on google image search :)
If any legit museum, or attorney involved with Fourth Amendment issues, would like it, please contact me at nagle@animats.com. It's just sitting around.
I bought it on eBay years ago, out of curiosity, and fixed it. I built a little control box to go with it, with a phone dial and a 9V battery, and found a source of paper tape and ink. So it can be demoed. If it ever is used in a court appearance or legislative testimony, that would be better than it sitting in a box.
Yeah I find the phone-taken images much worse than camera-taken even despite the astonishing number of megapixels and amount of technologies promised in the phones nowadays. Sadly most people don't buy the camera because it's too expensive and you need prepare yourself to take it with you (so the most photos are taken instantly with the phone)
"Back when Rudi Giuliani was prosecuting organized time" I can't even fathom he'd not be cashing checks from the mafia to go after other families. Odds are good that historians will find that he did.
He traded Italian organized crime for Russian organized crime.
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A similar story around this is the controversy around various Mumbai “encounter specialists” (a violent incident between police and gangsters is an “encounter”) and whether they were effectively hitmen for some faction of the local mob. Always thought it was quite intriguing stuff.