Government Can Hack Your Phone for Surveillance. Soon, We'll Get to See How Often.

The federal court system has confirmed it will begin publicly reporting how often federal judges allow law enforcement to use spyware and hacking tools to listen in on people's communications. The first numbers will appear in the 2028 Wiretap Report, published the following year. A spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts confirmed the change in an email to TechCrunch on August 14, 2026.

The new reporting category, called "spyware/hacking" surveillance internally, will track cases where authorities use what the government calls network investigating techniques, or NITs. Think of a NIT as a digital wiretap that works by hacking into a device or app to intercept messages and calls in real time, rather than asking a phone company to hand over records.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, was notified of the change by the Administrative Office. Wyden has called for this kind of data to be published since 2017 and has pushed for transparency on government hacking of Americans' devices for nearly a decade.

The Administrative Office has issued annual Wiretap Reports for almost two decades. Those reports break down authorized wiretaps by type: audio wiretaps, oral taps, and electronic interception of text messages, emails, and other messages passing through a provider's network. Until now, no public data has counted how often federal authorities deploy hacking tools such as spyware, despite the FBI using such methods since at least 1998.

The new spyware statistic will cover instances where authorities used spyware to intercept communications, such as Signal and WhatsApp calls and messages. It will not capture cases where tools were used to remotely hack into a phone and extract stored data such as images, files, and location information. That distinction matters because it leaves a substantial category of government hacking outside the public accounting.

Wiretaps require a high bar of evidence before a judge authorizes a live tap, allowing police to gain real-time access to calls, messages, and other communications. Attorneys at the Department of Justice's Office of Enforcement Operations review each wiretap application before it goes to a court. Federal appellate courts have long treated denials of wiretap orders as appealable final orders. The legal framework is well established. What is new is that a specific surveillance method within that framework will now get its own line in public reporting.

The legal definitions themselves are not fully settled. At least one federal trial court found that keystroke monitoring by spyware is not "electronic communication" as defined by the federal law that governs wiretap and surveillance rules. That ruling shows how new surveillance techniques can clash with older laws in ways that the public, and even lawyers, might not expect.

Federal and state courts reported a combined 24 percent decrease in authorized wiretaps in 2025 compared with 2024, according to the Judiciary's 2025 Wiretap Report. The overall volume of wiretap authorizations is declining even as the government prepares to begin separately tracking the spyware subset.

The announcement also comes against a backdrop of security concerns surrounding the federal judiciary's own systems. In August 2025, U.S. federal courts disclosed that their systems were targeted by cyberattacks, and the federal judiciary's electronic case filing system was breached in what was described as a sweeping hack believed to have exposed sensitive information. The U.S. government has taken unspecified "special measures" to protect people potentially exposed in that breach. A separate cyber breach involving the federal court records management system was investigated by the Justice Department in 2022.

The two threads are not directly connected. The wiretap reporting change is a policy decision driven by legislative pressure, while the court system breaches are security incidents. But anyone tracking the judiciary's handling of sensitive digital information will notice the tension: the courts are preparing to disclose more about government surveillance at a time when their own digital infrastructure has shown real vulnerabilities.

The gap between the 2026 announcement and the 2028 data collection, with publication in 2029, means that several years of spyware deployments will continue without public accounting. For technologists and civil liberties advocates who have sought this data, the timeline is the price of the concession. For the judiciary, it provides lead time to establish tracking methods for a surveillance category that involves classified tools and techniques.

The broader context here is about slow, incremental progress in an area where secrecy has long been the default. The new reporting category fills a gap that has persisted for nearly three decades, a stretch during which the government quietly expanded its hacking capabilities with no public record of how often those tools were used. Whether the disclosure will eventually extend beyond intercepted communications to cover the full range of government hacking techniques is an open question, and one that Wyden and other transparency advocates are likely to keep pressing.