Electronic Surveillance

Electronic surveillance has changed in many ways since the passing of the USA Patriot Act. Therefore, electronic surveillance can be divided into 4 categories; wiretaps, tracking devices, stored communications and subscriber information, and pen registers and trap devices (Hall, D. 2105). Before the Patriot Act, you would have to have to show very high need to get a warrant for wiretapping, kind of like getting a super warrant and this was due to The Wiretap Act and the Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control Act and Safe Streets Act of 1968 that regulated the use of any electronic surveillance. The Wiretap Act was more stringent than the Fourth Amendment by restricting what the court could approve on a wiretap search warrant. The court could only approve for certain crimes, such as, espionage, treason, murder, kidnapping, robbery, extortion, drug crimes, along with the bribery of a public official (Hall, D. 2105).

While wiretapping was limited to specific crimes prior to the Patriot Act, however, it changed after that by allowing it to be expanded to include terrorism, chemical weapons and computer crimes (Hall,
2105). Looking at both of the pre-laws and the present Patriot Act, I find that the main difference is the Patriot Act gutted the protections that was given to the American people, which was used to keep the government from abusing its authority. Therefore, the Patriot Act reduced the standard required by law enforcement when it came to obtaining information, obtaining a warrant for example, and now it only requires it to be relevant to someone with possible ties to terrorism or foreign intelligence ("Congress Seeks To Expand Warrantless Surveillance Under The Patriot Act |