Electronic surveillance up 5x in DC area since 2011, almost all sealed cases

Uncovering secret surveillance enabled by the courts? Easy to read graphs that have a y-axis starting at zero? Paywall free, informative content? I clicked a few ads to say thanks.

When only 1 of 4,100 cases over five years in a particular district has the public record unsealed, I think it's safe to call this a cover-up.

> Yet the listings of how often law enforcement applied to judges to conduct covert electronic surveillance — a list that itself is usually sealed... The information about what are known as pen register and trap and trace orders was made public after litigation by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), journalists and others, including some service providers.

You know, when the press operates as it should, as nonpartisan fact finder and uncovering truth through hard-fought FOIA battles, well first your sick about whatever you just read, then at least you feel a bit better knowing that at least someone is trying to shine some light on it.

Seems odd that they didn't define the term "pen register" beyond the "(outbound messages)" in the graphic. From Wikipedia: "A pen register, or dialed number recorder (DNR), is an electronic device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line."

> ... warrant appeared to authorize the FBI to secretly place code, or malware, on all computers that logged in to an anonymous email service...

I keep thinking of the parallels between the actions of spearphishing criminals and these law enforcement agencies.

Every time I see Northern Virginia and these volumes of requests from the government, I think Amazon and us-east-1.

One thing worth noting here, is that it's unclear if this means electronic surveillance is up 5x in the DC area (as the area of investigation). As the article notes, these courts routinely handle requests for nationwide investigations. It would be interesting to repeat this process with other federal districts, especially in major cities.