If, like Rockwell,* you always feel like somebody’s watching you, it probably isn’t the government.
Well, I mean, the government almost surely is watching you—it collects information on virtually everyone, in more ways than most people realize. When you bank, drive on the road, travel by air. Your taxes, of course.
And this doesn’t include the third-party data that the government buys access to through commercial databases. Much of that information is then compiled and sold. As they say, if you aren’t paying for the product…you are the product. We will give away a shocking amount of personal info for free email.
(You also probably tell Google your deepest secrets, including some things you wouldn’t even tell your closest friend. https://lnkd.in/gv5-Wpvd)
Most of this information is innocuous and while it is gathered automatically and available if someone did a specific search for it (with a warrant, if necessary), it otherwise mostly just exists.
The government could also actively collect other info if it wanted to, like the outside markings on all the mail you receive. (“Mail covers” can sometimes be a helpful investigative resource.)
And there are the ways the government can watch you without obtaining a warrant, like physical surveillance (which was fun to do but is labor intensive) or “pole cameras.” There is little accounting to know how often those things occur.
But what I meant to say is that the government probably isn’t wiretapping you.
Yesterday the United States Courts issued its annual wiretapping report for 2024. Even though the number of wiretaps rose, there was still just a modest 2,297 of them. Considering how ubiquitous cell phones are (and 96% of the taps were for mobile devices), the chances of you being one of the targets is vanishingly small. And if you aren’t dealing drugs, cut that number in half.
But then consider that just like the tango, it takes (at least) two people to have a phone conversation, so double it back. That might help explain why even though there were just under 2,300 wiretaps, they resulted in almost 5,500 arrests.
Candidly, my experience was that given their cost, the effort and resources required, and the other investigative activities that agents and cops assigned to support wires had to forego, they were rarely worth it.
If you’d like to know more about wiretapping activity last year, your can read full details here: https://lnkd.in/gU64Nd82.
(I wrote about the 2023 report here: https://lnkd.in/gkDSJKgW.)
*Yes, my aim was to earwig you with this awesome hit song from 1983. If I have to sing it all day, so should you. https://lnkd.in/gvCMS6BV