Телефон желісінен қоңырау шалған нөмірлерді тіркеу құрылғысы

Device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line

A pen register, or dialed number recorder (DNR), is a device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line. The term has come to include any device or program that performs similar functions to an original pen register, including programs monitoring Internet communications. The United States statutes governing pen registers are codified under 18 U. S. C., Chapter 206.

In Katz v. United States (1967), the United States Supreme Court established its "reasonable expectation of privacy" test. It overturned Olmstead v. United States (1928) and held that warrantless wiretaps were unconstitutional searches, because there was a reasonable expectation that the communication would be private. From then on, the government was required to get a warrant to execute a wiretap. Twelve years later the Supreme Court held that a pen register is not a search because the "petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the telephone company." Smith v. Maryland, 442 U. S. 735, 744 (1979). Since the defendant had disclosed the dialed numbers to the telephone company so they could connect his call, he did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers he dialed. The court did not distinguish between disclosing the numbers to a human operator or just the automatic equipment used by the telephone company. The Smith decision left pen registers completely outside constitutional protection. If there was to be any privacy protection, it would have to be enacted by Congress as statutory privacy law. Thus, a government attorney only needs to certify that information will "likely" be obtained in relation to an 'ongoing criminal investigation'. This is the lowest requirement for receiving a court order under any of the ECPA's three titles. This is because in Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court ruled that use of a pen register does not constitute a search. The ruling held that only the content of a conversation should receive full constitutional protection under the right to privacy; since pen registers do not intercept conversation, they do not pose as much threat to this right. Some have argued that the government should be required to present "specific and articulable facts" showing that the information to be gathered is relevant and material to an ongoing investigation. This is the standard used by Title II of the ECPA with regard to the contents of stored communications. Others, such as Daniel J. Solove, Petricia Bellia, and Dierdre Mulligan, believe that probable cause and a warrant should be necessary. Paul Ohm argues that standard of proof should be replaced/reworked for electronic communications altogether. The Pen Register Act did not include an exclusionary rule. While there were civil remedies for violations of the Act, evidence gained in violation of the Act can still be used against a defendant in court. There have also been calls for Congress to add an exclusionary rule to the Pen Register Act, as this would make it more analogous to traditional Fourth Amendment protections. The penalty for violating the Pen Register Act is a misdemeanor, and it carries a prison sentence of not more than one year.

Section 216 of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act expanded the definition of a pen register to include devices or programs that provide an analogous function with Internet communications. Prior to the Patriot Act, it was unclear whether or not the definition of a pen register, which included very specific telephone terminology, could apply to Internet communications. Most courts and law enforcement personnel operated under the assumption that it did, however, the Clinton administration had begun to work on legislation to make that clear, and one magistrate judge in California did rule that the language was too telephone specific to apply to Internet surveillance. The Pen Register Statute is a privacy act. As there is no constitutional protection for information divulged to a third party under the Supreme Court's expectation of privacy test, and the routing information for phone and Internet communications are divulged to the company providing the communication, the absence or inapplicability of the statute would leave the routing information for those communications completely unprotected from government surveillance. The government also has an interest in making sure the Pen Register Act exists and applies to Internet communications. Without the Act, they cannot compel service providers to give them records or do Internet surveillance with their own equipment or software, and the law enforcement agency, which may not have very good technological capabilities, will have to do the surveillance itself at its own cost. Rather than creating new laws regarding Internet surveillance, the Patriot Act simply expanded the definition of a pen register to include computer software programs doing Internet surveillance by accessing information. While not completely compatible with the technical definition of a pen register device, this was the interpretation that had been used by almost all courts and law enforcement agencies prior to the change. In 2013, the Obama administration sought a court order "requiring Verizon on an 'ongoing, daily basis' to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries". The order was approved on April 25, 2013, by federal Judge Roger Vinson, member of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which court had been created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The order gave the government unlimited authority to compel Verizon to collect and provide the data for a specified three month period ending on July 19. This is the first time significant and top secret documents have been revealed exposing the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under U. S. President Barack Obama. According to The Guardian, "it is not known whether Verizon is the only cell phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three month order was a one off or the latest in a series of similar orders".

On September 1, 2013, the DEA's Hemisphere Project was revealed to the public by The New York Times. In a series of PowerPoint slides acquired through a lawsuit, AT&T is revealed to be operating a call database going back to 1987 which the DEA has warrantless access to with no judicial oversight under "administrative subpoenas" originated by the DEA. The DEA pays AT&T to maintain employees throughout the country devoted to investigating call records through this database for the DEA. The database grows by 4 billion records per day, and presumably covers all traffic that crosses AT&T's network. Internal directives instructed participants never to reveal the project publicly, despite the fact that the project was portrayed as a "routine" part of DEA investigations; several investigations unrelated to drugs have been mentioned as using the data. When questioned on their participation, Verizon, Sprint, and T Mobile refused to comment on whether they were part of the project, generating fears that pen registers and trap and trace devices are effectively irrelevant in the face of ubiquitous private public partnership surveillance with indefinite data retention.