I’m in the middle of a self-imposed Sopranos marathon. If you’ve seen the show (or pretty much any other crime movie or show), you know that all the criminals talk on payphones because they think it is secure.
Can the police (local or federal) tap payphones?
If so, how do they keep from tapping it when a random person is using it, as opposed to a criminal? After all, if it was tapped 24 hours a day, wouldn’t it be an illegal invasion of privacy to tap innocent citizen’s phonecalls?
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I have a question about it. Why would it be an invasion of privacy to tap an innocent citizen’s phone calls, but not an invasion of privacy to tap a guilty citizen’s phone calls?
Yes, they can, at least technology-wise. A phone number is a phone number.
Is it legal? Who knows. Depending on who you’re aftre, you could probably get a judge to ok it. The “innocent phone user” part is tricky- maybe the phone tap warrant would have to say something like “anybody besides Gotti (just an example!) uses this phone, we erase it right away and can’t prosecute if they say something incriminating.”
Achernar, it’s not an invasion of privacy if you have a warrant. It is an integral part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
That makes sense. I didn’t realize that there was a warrant involved. I don’t watch enough television, I guess.
Or you just aren’t in touch with your inner criminal!
Good thing, too, given how much I apparently know about law enforcement.
Yes, they can and do. However, IIRC they have to watch the payphone they’re tapping and only listen when the criminal is using it. I remember reading how it was a pain in the butt, and is usually used as part of basic surveillance. It works because lots of times the bad guy is using the same payphone, outside his favorite bar or whatever. I do not have a specific cite for this, it is somewhere in “The Underground Empire” by James Mills.
What ever happened at the payphone where they “recieved information” about the snipers?
I know that there were some very controversial changes to the wiretapping laws, courtesy of John Ashcroft. I think that the deal is previously, you could only get a warrant for a particular phone that belonged to a particular person, but now it’s much easier to get a warrant for any phone that the person under investigation might use. I hope someone can explain the legal issues, but in the meantime, I submit this:
In one of the investigations of a NYC family, the gov. tapped the payphone outside one of those “social clubs” and it turned out to be quite effective. This despite the Boss ordering his guys to not use that payphone and having it destroyed a couple times (but it was always quickly replaced).
Yes, as a technological matter, and yes, as a legal matter, if pursuant to a warrant issued upon probable cause. By the way, any search, even a lawful one, constitutes “an invasion of privacy,” for if it did not, it would not even constitute a search; this is why it is not considered a “search” for a police officer standing beside a parked vehicle to spot (through the window) a bag of marijuana on the floorboard. (For similar reasons, it is not considered a “detention” to ask a passerby if he wouldn’t mind stopping to discuss a matter of interest to the officer.) When true invasions of privacy occur pursuant to a warrant and/or probable cause (there are many excpetions to the warrant requirement and few to the probable cause requirement), privacy is very much “invaded”; the invasion, however, is deemed legally authorized. Btw, evidence obtained as a result of a “private” search (i.e., one by a non-governmental actor) is not ordinarily subject to exclusion from a criminal proceeding on that account, even though the search itself might be otherwise illegal and thus actionable (most likely civilly, rather than criminally).