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Wall Street & Technology: Blog: How Prosecutors Wiretap Wall Street

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Wall Street & Technology: Blog: How Prosecutors Wiretap Wall Street
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Hearing that the alleged Raj Rajaratnam-led insider trading ring was detected using wiretaps and that the U.S. attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, plans to employ the same kind of electronic surveillance for future Wall Street investigations, we were momentarily seized with the geeky desire to know how these wiretaps are performed. Are agents sneaking into offices and homes in the middle of the night to bug phones?

The answer is both more mundane and more alarming. Prosecutors are using the FBI's massive surveillance system, DCSNet, which stands for Digital Collection System Network. According to Wired magazine, this system connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It can be used to instantly wiretap almost any communications device in the U.S. — wireless or tethered. In other words, you and I have no privacy. The government can listen in on any call made in the continental U.S. (This is all well and good if you trust every government employee. But what if an attorney general running for higher office will do anything to finger a high-profile target? Or what if a prosecutor has a personal grudge he'd like to fulfill? It seems to me it would be easy for this power to fall into the wrong hands.)

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties union for the digital world, puts it, "The U.S. government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001." The group has been trying to sue telecommunications providers such as AT&T for their participation in such "...
Original URL
http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/blog/archives/2009/10/how_prosecutors.html;jsessionid=M02VOGQVJ30Q1QE1GHPCKHWATMY32JVN

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    • Geoffrey Ames Geoffrey Ames
      8 weeks ago


      Do we have a right to privacy? Just because something can be done (i.e., unlimited, unwarranted, electronic surveillance) does not mean it should be done.
      Ethics, Questions of
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