government agencies were monitoring citizens’ communications on a vast scale. In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that U.S. According to Freeh, he got no apology: “You’ve got to get bigger computers,” Gates said. In 1998, Louis Freeh, then the director of the F.B.I., complained to Bill Gates that encryption software, including Microsoft’s, had rendered the wiretap obsolete. In the nineties, Mexican cartels adopted encryption to scramble their phone calls. High-level commands can be conveyed using pizzini, but the method is too slow for the hour-to-hour operations of a drug empire. Bernardo Provenzano, the Sicilian Mafia don, communicated through pizzini-messages written on tiny pieces of paper-using a variant of the Caesar cipher, an elementary mode of encryption in which each letter is shifted three places in the alphabet. Some underworld figures have avoided phones altogether. Since the exposure of the wiretap, criminals have tried to stay one step ahead of eavesdroppers. New York’s police commissioner, Arthur Woods, defended his officers’ methods, saying, “You can’t always do detective work in a high hat and kid gloves.”Ĭrooks have always wanted to talk without being heard, and cops have always wanted to listen without being seen. In 1916, news of the practice leaked, resulting in an outcry and a public inquiry-not least because the police had been tapping the calls of priests. Strong, approved the technique, and for two decades wiretapping secretly flourished at the N.Y.P.D. In 1895, a police officer in Manhattan who had once worked for a telephone company, and whose name has been lost to history, suggested adding a hidden circuit to lines used by known criminals: a wiretap.
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