Federal Courts Will Start Counting Spyware Wiretaps, With First Figures Due in 2029

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts says a new “spyware/hacking” category joins the 2028 Wiretap Report. It will count interception of messages and calls — not phone hacking that pulls stored files.

The Administrative Office of the United States Courts will begin counting how often judges authorize wiretaps carried out with hacking tools and spyware, adding a new “spyware/hacking” category to the 2028 edition of its annual Wiretap Report, according to TechCrunch, which reported the change on August 14, 2026. That report is published the year after the data year, so the first public tally would appear in 2029.

The Administrative Office of the United States Courts told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon about the change during the week of the TechCrunch report. A spokesperson for the office confirmed it in an email to TechCrunch.

“The Wiretap Report is compiled from individual forms submitted from throughout the country and throughout the year. Before the new data can appear in the annual report, reporting forms and procedures need to be updated to accommodate the new categories,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch.

What the existing series already publishes

The Administrative Office of the United States Courts has issued the Wiretap Reports for almost two decades, per TechCrunch. The series counts how many wiretaps were authorized each year and breaks the numbers down by whether federal or state judges ordered them, in which states the wiretaps were conducted, and what type of crime was investigated.

The reports also separate the kind of tap: audio wiretaps that collect live voice from phone calls; oral taps that use microphones and other real-world eavesdropping; and electronic taps that intercept text messages, emails and other messages moving across a provider's network. The federal government files hacking tools under a category it calls network investigative techniques, or NITs. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has used hacking techniques and tools since at least 1998, TechCrunch reports, with no public count of how often.

What the new number will not show

The new statistic covers only spyware used to intercept communications as they happen, such as Signal and WhatsApp calls and messages. It will not cover tools used to remotely break into a phone and pull out data stored on it — images, files, location history. Interception is a wiretap; pulling stored data is a search, a separate legal process that falls outside the report.

The reporting available here does not say which spyware products or vendors will be named, if any, and does not say whether the spyware count will be broken out by state or by federal judicial district the way other wiretap figures are. For readers in Los Angeles, that leaves open whether California-level or Central District of California figures will be visible when the first numbers land.

The reaction TechCrunch gathered

Wyden, who has pushed for this data to be published since 2017, welcomed the change and told TechCrunch that “the American people remain largely in the dark about the different ways that the government is spying on them.” He said Congress should also pass his Government Surveillance Transparency Act, a draft bill he and others reintroduced earlier in 2026.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told TechCrunch that “up until now, we have only been able to guess at the size of the problem.” She argued the count will make abuse harder to deny: “It's hard to say that you're using spyware as a surgical tool when you've deployed it tens of thousands of times.”

Brett Max Kaufman, a senior counsel in the American Civil Liberties Union's Center for Democracy, called the move “an important and long-overdue step forward for transparency around government hacking,” in comments to TechCrunch.

Some countries already publish this kind of data. In Italy, spyware was used against 4,321 targets in 2023, according to publicly available figures cited by TechCrunch.