Verizon Law Enforcement: Fill & Download for Free

Telephone wiretaps are placed by court order, so technically you might find yourself in contempt of court if you were to interfere with one. However, if you’re up to something sinister enough to justify the effort that a wiretap requires, being in contempt of court is probably the smallest of your problems.That said, there is no practical way for someone to “remove” a wiretap. In the days of analog telephones, every telephone line required a twisted pair of wires that led from the telephone junction box (in the case of an internal switchboard) or the phone itself to the telephone central office. A wiretap was literally that, a connection to that twisted pair of wires to a handset or a recorder that was listening in on the calls.Now that nearly all phone calls are transmitted digitally, wiretaps exist as a few lines of code in a computer. The data stream passing through the target’s telephone account is copied to another destination, where it is monitored and analyzed.It’s very difficult, maybe impossible, for law enforcement or anyone else to get access to a telephone account without the complicity of the service provider. AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and all the other telephone service providers have liaison offices that receive wiretap orders from law enforcement, review them to ensure they are timely and in order, and implement the steps to provide the information. Unless you had a direct line to this function in the service provider’s company, you would not be able to remove a wiretap.

It’s a shockingly high percentage. I’ve never been in law enforcement but I have friends and co-workers who are or were and, as a private investigator, I am often involved (usually on the defense side) in the investigation of criminal cases. Your question hits on a topic that has long fascinated me. Even given the fact that the average criminal is not terribly bright, you would think that even the dumbest among us would grasp the concept that the WORST thing to brag about is a felony that you recently committed. Despite that, one ex-DEA colleague of mine told me that our prisons would be half empty if only criminals would learn to keep their yaps shut.It’s one thing to rob a bank and then brag to your buddy (bad idea) or your uncle (worse idea) or your girlfriend (even worse idea) or some drunk next to you at the bar (even more worse idea). But is there anyone left in America (and I don’t just mean any criminal but any human being with a television) who isn’t aware of the existence of jailhouse snitches? It boggles the mind that someone arrested for a crime and tossed in a cell pending trial would freely admit his guilt to the stranger in the bunk above him. If the cops didn’t specifically plant that cellmate there for that very purpose (which they do all the time), the stranger you just confessed to will likely be an opportunist desperately searching for any angle to get his own sentence reduced and ratting you out won’t cause him to lose one minute of sleep. The concept of “honor among thieves”, if it ever existed, died out long ago.Of course, technology has upped the ante on bragging about your crimes. These days the (decidedly unwise) verbal admission of a crime has largely been replaced by (exponentially dumber) text, IM and video messaging proof of one’s guilt thus making it (with the assistance of the friendly folks at Verizon, Google, Instagram, etc.) that much easier for law enforcement to quickly wrap up their investigation with a nice bow on it. In the old days, the bragging of a criminal would have to make its way via word-of-mouth to the wrong ears before the cops showed up at his door. Now, dimwitted law breakers blast out word of their crimes (frequently in real-time and often accompanied by helpful photo and video evidence) to the entire World Wide Web!To read more on this topic, see my response to an earlier, related Quora question: Brad Robinson's answer to What is your favorite unsolved real crime and why?Home#PrivateInvestigator

I'm guessing, but if I recall correctly, Sprint has lower credit requirements than AT&T and Verizon. This will typically translate into those with less money applying for service and criminals typically come from those groups with less means than those with more means.