U.S. courts: Electronic surveillance requests spike in D.C. area since 2011

WASHINGTON — Secret law enforcement requests to conduct electronic surveillance in domestic criminal cases have surged in federal courts for Northern Virginia and the District of Columbia, but only 1 in a thousand of the applications ever becomes public, newly released data show.

The release by the courts leaves unanswered how long, in what ways and for what crimes federal investigators tracked individuals’ data and whether long-running investigations result in charges.

Yet the listings of how often law enforcement applied to judges to conduct covert electronic surveillance — a list that itself is usually sealed — were seen as underscoring the exponential growth in the use of a 1986 law to collect data about users’ telephone, email and other Internet communications.

Unsealing basic docket information “is an important first step for courts to recognize that they have been enabling a kind of vast, secret system of surveillance that we now know to be so pervasive,” said Brett Max Kaufman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Center for Democracy.

The two federal courts are among the most active in the country, with investigations that can span the country — and are the only ones known to make even modest disclosures about their surveillance dockets.

In Northern Virginia, electronic surveillance requests increased 500 percent in the past five years, from 305 in 2011 to a pace set to pass 1,800 this year.

Only 1 of the total 4,113 applications in those five years had been unsealed as of late July, according to information from the Alexandria division of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Mr. Kaufman’s group obtained those data in July.

The federal court for the District of Columbia had 235 requests in 2012, made by the local U.S. attorney’s office. By 2013, requests in the District of Columbia had climbed 240 percent, to about 564, according to information released by the court’s chief judge and clerk.

Three of the 235 applications from 2012 have been unsealed.

Data on users’ electronic communications can include sender and recipient information, and the time, date, duration and size of calls, emails, instant messages and social media messages, as well as device identification numbers and some website information.