The federal judiciary will begin publicly disclosing how many times judges have approved the deployment of spyware and hacking tools to intercept real-time communications, according to a TechCragon.com report published August 14. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts confirmed it will track a new "spyware/hacking" surveillance category beginning with the 2028 Wiretap Report, set to be published in 2029. The FBI has deployed hacking techniques and tools, including spyware, since at least 1998, but no public data has ever counted how frequently federal authorities have used them.

For nearly twenty years, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has released annual Wiretap Reports that break down how many wiretaps were authorized each year, categorized by whether federal or state judges ordered them, in which states they were conducted, and what crimes were being investigated. The reports currently distinguish between audio wiretaps that capture real-time voice from phone calls, oral taps that use physical microphones and other eavesdropping methods, and electronic tapping of text messages, emails, and other messages as they move through a provider's network. The new category will track when authorities use spyware to intercept communications like Signal and WhatsApp calls and messages—what the government calls network investigating techniques, or NITs—but won't reveal when they remotely hack into a phone to extract stored data such as images, files, and location information, since that constitutes a search rather than a wiretap.

Democratic senator Ron Wyden, who has pushed for this type of data to be made public since 2017, celebrated the change. "The American people remain largely in the dark about the different ways that the government is spying on them," Wyden said in a statement. Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an expert on government spyware, told TechCrunch that until now, "we have only been able to guess at the size of the problem." Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union's Center for Democracy, called the shift "an important and long-overdue step forward for transparency around government hacking."

The new transparency measure matters because wiretaps are highly invasive to privacy, requiring law enforcement to present a high bar of evidence that a crime is being committed before a judge will authorize real-time surveillance. According to the report, wiretaps are issued in far fewer numbers than search warrants but can still sweep up a large volume of people's communications—one wiretap years ago enabled a massive surveillance operation that collected millions of text messages over three months. Privacy advocates say the statistics will help hold the U.S. government accountable when spyware is abused, making it harder for authorities to deny the tools were deployed. Galperin explained that being able to point to a report showing spyware was used a specific number of times will aid accountability, especially if that number turns out to be high. "It's hard to say that you're using spyware as a surgical tool when you've deployed it tens of thousands of times," she added.

Before the data can appear in the annual report, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said reporting forms and procedures need to be updated to accommodate the new categories, since the Wiretap Report is compiled from individual forms submitted from throughout the country and throughout the year. Wyden has reintroduced the Government Surveillance Transparency Act this year, a draft bill he and others first proposed in 2017, calling on Congress to go further in requiring disclosure of electronic surveillance orders. Other countries already publish detailed spyware data—Italy, for example, reported that spyware was used against 4,321 targets in 2023, according to publicly available information. The shift in U.S. policy represents a rare moment when oversight mechanisms catch up to technology that's been in use for decades, offering citizens a window into surveillance practices that have remained hidden despite their far-reaching implications for civil liberties.