For that reason, people do not like wiretapping. The government has made no showing of need for this additional authority, let alone a showing that its need for more wiretaps outweighs the threat to privacy such expanded authority would pose. Nor has the government made any showing that judges should be stripped of the authority to require law enforcement to periodically justify continued application of a wiretap, or that its need to use in court conversations gathered in an illegal wiretap would justify doing away with the statutory exclusionary rule. Due to space limitations, parenthetical descriptions of these statutes often do not include or fully describe all of the activities they prohibit. Please refer to the actual statute.
Intercepts stay in place far longer today than they used to.
In 1970, the average electronic surveillance intercept was in place for fewer than 20 days. 5 and 21. These figures are for 1994. For the period of 1998401994, an average of 117 persons' calls were intercepted per wiretap. 6 and 16.