Excellent article detailing how legal wiretapping in the United States was forced to grow with technology.In the old days, everyone was linked to a lug nut... (everyone's telephone) ended up in the basement of the telephone company's switching station. There, the wire emerged, pegged to a rack by a single copper lug nut. Acres of racks lined the walls, each holding rows and columns of lug nuts and their wires, neatly stacked atop each other...
And then it all went sideways.
At the same time that the phone companies were preparing for the transition to digital, the use of cellphones -- which were inherently harder to tap because they used phone lines differently than analog devices -- mushroomed. ...Electronic surveillance, once such a dependable, relatively easy craft, was becoming inordinately difficult. (more)
