United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

law, a roving wiretap is a special kind of

wiretap Telephone tapping (also wire tapping or wiretapping in American English) is the monitoring of telephone and Internet-based conversations by a third party, often by covert means. The wire tap received its name because, historically, the monitorin ...

permit that follows the surveillance target. For instance, if a target attempts to defeat a regular wiretap by throwing away a phone and acquiring a new one, another surveillance order would usually need to be applied for to tap the new one. A "roving wiretap", once authorized, follows the target rather than a specific phone device, and would give the surveilling body permission to tap second and subsequent phones without applying for new surveillance orders. In the US, it is allowed under amendments made to Title III of the ''

Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (, codified at ''et seq.'') was legislation passed by the Congress of the United States and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson that established the Law Enforcement Assistance Admi ...

'' (the "Wiretap Statute") in 1988 by the ''

Electronic Communications Privacy Act Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) was enacted by the United States Congress to extend restrictions on government wire taps of telephone calls to include transmissions of electronic data by computer ( ''et seq.''), added new pro ...

'', and was later expanded by section 604 of the '' Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999''.''

U.S. Government Printing Office The United States Government Publishing Office (USGPO or GPO; formerly the United States Government Printing Office) is an agency of the legislative branch of the United States Federal government. The office produces and distributes information ...

'
H.R. 3694
/ref>Fred E. Foldvary (1999)

''The Progress Report''. Accessed 30 June 2007. On 26 May 2011, the U.S. Senate voted to extend the provisions of the 2001

USA PATRIOT Act The USA PATRIOT Act (commonly known as the Patriot Act) was a landmark Act of Congress, Act of the United States Congress, signed into law by President of the United States, President George W. Bush. The formal name of the statute is the Uniti ...

to search business records and allow for roving wiretaps. The roving wiretap provision of the Patriot Act briefly expired on 1 June 2015, but was restored the next day by enactment of the

USA Freedom Act The USA Freedom Act (, ) is a U.S. law enacted on June 2, 2015, that restored and modified several provisions of the Patriot Act, which had expired the day before. The act imposes some new limits on the bulk collection of telecommunication metada ...

External links

Electronic Frontier Foundation's wiretap page

White Paper on The USA PATRIOT Act’s "Roving" Electronic Surveillance Amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Actmirror

References

Law enforcement equipment Espionage devices Freedom of expression Law of the United States History of civil rights in the United States {{law-enforcement-stub