US courts to disclose how often government uses spyware

The U.S. federal judiciary will for the first time publicly disclose how often judges authorize wiretaps carried out with spyware and other hacking tools, starting with the 2028 Wiretap Report, which will be published in 2029. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which coordinates operations across the judiciary, confirmed the change this week to Democratic senator Ron Wyden, who has pushed for the disclosure since 2017.

For almost two decades, the office has issued annual Wiretap Reports breaking down how many wiretaps were authorized each year, by federal or state judges, by state, and by the type of crime under investigation — but with no separate count for wiretaps carried out using what the FBI calls network investigative techniques, or NITs, a category that includes spyware. The FBI has used hacking tools since at least 1998. A spokesperson for the Administrative Office told TechCrunch that reporting forms and procedures need to be updated before the new “spyware/hacking” category can appear in the annual report.

The new figure will only capture wiretaps — the interception of real-time communications such as Signal or WhatsApp calls and messages — not the separate legal process of hacking into a phone to extract stored data like photos, files, or location history. Because wiretaps require a higher evidentiary bar than search warrants, they’re issued in far smaller numbers, though a single wiretap can still sweep up enormous volumes of data; one, years ago, collected millions of text messages over three months.

“The American people remain largely in the dark about the different ways that the government is spying on them,” Wyden said, adding that he wants Congress to pass his Government Surveillance Transparency Act, a bill he reintroduced earlier this year. Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, called the change an important step toward accountability. Other countries already publish this kind of data: Italy reported that spyware was used against 4,321 targets in 2023.

Why it matters

The disclosure could finally give lawmakers, researchers, and the public a rough measure of how widely the government relies on hacking tools — data that has, until now, been anyone’s guess.