Introduction

>>> Each April, the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts is required by federal law to submit to Congress a report detailing the number of federal and state wiretaps approved or authorized during the previous calendar year. On 01 May 2006, the Office posted this report here: www.uscourts.gov/wiretap05/contents.html

One PDF file contained the main body of the report, and multiple separate PDFs contained the 9 text tables and 4 appendix tables.

A press release about the report is here.

On the evening of 03 May, a librarian reported on an email discussion list that all the files had been deleted from the US Courts website. A copy was not in Google's cache, although the cache did show a page with a deleted link to the 2005 report.

I contacted several journalists who had written about the report to see if they still had a copy of it on their hard drives. They didn't, but on 04 May, one of the reporters (Jarrett Murphy of the Village Voice) called the US Courts' press officer, who said that the report had been yanked because it contained information that is still under judicial seal. A sanitized version of the report is expected to be posted soon.

Soon after I contacted Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center about this, Sherwin Siy of EPIC kindly emailed the body of the original, uncensored report, which he had downloaded and saved. It is posted above. (It has also been posted to EPIC's site, currently on the front page.)

(Note: Text in parentheses was added 05 May 2006, 11AM PST)