Nevada is the state where the most wiretaps were conducted in 2013 when population is factored in, a review by
Pew Research Center reveals.
Citing an annual list of the states where federal and state judges authorized the monitoring of phone communications, California, the nation's most populous state, had the most wiretap authorizations overall.
The list also showed that Nevada, California, Colorado and New York, which between them have a quarter of the U.S. population, accounted for one half of the country's wiretapping authorizations.
In 90 percent of the cases nationwide, the authorization requests said that drug-related offenses was the reason, while the remaining applications differed from smuggling to murder investigations.
The report found that the wiretaps resulted in 3,744 people arrested, around the same number as in 2012, while 709 people were actually convicted of a crime.
Federal and state judges authorized a total of 3,455 wiretaps on cell phones and digital pagers in 2013, which is 97 percent of the total 3,576 approvals from the courts.
Although the number of wiretaps has more than doubled in a decade, the figure was only an increase of 5 percent over 2012.
California had 26 percent of the overall total of wiretap authorizations while New York came second with 12 percent, and Nevada and Florida were in third with 6 percent each.
But Nevada leads the U.S. with 38 mobile wiretaps for every 500,000 people while Colorado was second with 12 authorizations for every half a million people. California and New York were close behind.
"Why are there so many wiretaps in Nevada? We don't really know," wrote Pew's Martin Shelton.
"The state does have the second-highest violent-crime rate in 2012, with 607.6 incidents per 100,000 people," according to FBI statistics.
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