The government’s spyware playbook has had one big problem for the public: there has been no reliable count of how often it is used.
That is set to change as U.S. federal courts prepare to track spyware and hacking-based communications interceptions in a new category of the annual Wiretap Report.
The development matters because spyware can put investigators much closer to the source of a person’s communications than conventional network interception can. Yet while the judiciary has published detailed statistics on court-authorized wiretaps for decades, those reports have not separately shown how many specifically involved government spyware techniques.
The figures to come will still leave some questions unanswered. But they...
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