When was the wiretap invented?

Answer 1

During the American Civil War, government officials under President Abraham Lincoln eavesdropped on telegraph conversations. Telephone wiretapping began in the 1890s, following the invention of the telephone recorder. Wiretapping has also been carried out under most Presidents, usually with a lawful warrant since the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional in 1928. Domestic wiretapping under the Clinton administration led to the capture of Aldrich Ames, a former Soviet spy in 1994. Robert F. Kennedy monitored the activity of Martin Luther King Jr. by wiretapping in 1966. In the Greek telephone tapping case 2004-2005 more than 100 mobile phone numbers belonging mostly to members of the Greek government, including the Prime Minister of Greece, and top-ranking civil servants were found to have been illegally tapped for a period of at least one year. The Greek government concluded this had been done by a foreign intelligence agency, for security reasons related to the 2004 Olympic Games, by unlawfully activating the lawful interception subsystem of the Vodafone Greece mobile network. The most recent case of U.S. wiretapping was the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy discovered in December 2005. It aroused much controversy, after several people accused President George W. Bush of violating a specific federal statute (FISA) and the United States Constitution. The president argued his authorization was consistent with other federal statutes (AUMF), other provisions of the Constitution, and was necessary to keep America safe from terrorism, and could lead to the capture of notorious terrorists responsible for 9/11.