Photo: The Library of Virginia /Flickr The number of criminal wiretaps authorized by federal and state judges in 2011 decreased 14 percent from the year prior to 2,732, according to the latest figures available. The vast majority of the wiretaps covered in the government report are for drug investigations and nearly all of them target mobile phones. Don’t go thinking, however, that the government’s love for electronic snooping has faded. The data , which the government is required to publish annually, covers just a small part of the nation’s ever-growing surveillance society. The government has at its disposal a variety of methods to capture Americans’ communications and data without warrants or with super-secret national security wiretap warrants that aren’t covered in this report. Forbes noted that the latest figures, published Friday, are the fifth time in two decades “the count of wiretaps has fallen year-over-year .” And while there was a decrease from 3,194 approved wiretaps from 2010, we might expect their use, or at least requests for them, to edge back up in the wake of a Supreme Court decision in January that said the authorities need a warrant to affix a GPS device to a vehicle to track its every movement. The government has many other tools to tap Americans’ communications, meaning the decrease in wiretaps could just be a statistical blip, or it could mean that court-ordered wiretaps are taking a back seat to other methods of warrantless, data extraction

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Wiretap Stats Decrease, But Don’t Go Celebrating Yet