>> You're witnessing a solved case among tens-of-thousands that never see a hearing. Some anecdotal evidence to support this. Back in the early aughts I worke

>> You're witnessing a solved case among tens-of-thousands that never see a hearing. Some anecdotal evidence to support this. Back in the early aughts I worked at a cellphone place. We had a Nextel repair shop. Since we were located in the downtown area, we had several government clients. One of those just happened to be the FBI. The FBI agents were some of the most interesting people I spoke to. I got to chatting up one of their agents about surveillance and the new wave of meth dealers using rural areas for their labs. The agent straight up said its been nearly impossible for them to surveil these people because they knew they could only use a burner phone for 3 months before having to ditch it. Somehow, they had figured out the timeframe it takes for the FBI to get a warrant for their phone, send it to the carrier and then the carrier to set up a tap on the phone or get the phone records and send them back to the FBI so they could start tracing the calls. The agent said the dealers would never destroy the phone either, they would just throw them away, or take them to the local landfill and just pitch them over the fence. The agent said they wouldn't break them so then the FBI would continue the process of getting the warrant, effectively buying them time to get a new phone and ahead of them once more. The agent also said the gangs were setting up in rural areas now since they don't have the law enforcement necessary to go after them and rural folk are so spread out, then tend to keep to themselves more. Keep in mind this was 20+ years ago, but even back then, the FBI was having a hard time pinning these people down by trying to leverage the data they were getting from the carriers.