What does government pay to surveil?

WASHINGTON - How much are your private conversations worth to the government? Turns out that it can be a lot, depending on the technology.

In the era of intense government surveillance and secret court orders, a murky multimillion-dollar market has emerged. Paid for by U.S. tax dollars but with little public scrutiny, surveillance fees charged in secret by technology and phone companies can vary wildly.

AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 "activation fee" for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that, according to industry disclosures made last year to U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D., Mass.).

Meanwhile, e-mail records like those amassed by the National Security Agency through a program revealed by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden probably were collected free or very cheaply. Facebook says it doesn't charge the government for access. And while Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google won't say how much they charge, the American Civil Liberties Union found that e-mail records can be turned over for as little as $25.

The industry says it doesn't profit from the hundreds of thousands of government eavesdropping requests it receives each year. Civil liberties groups want businesses to charge. They worry that government surveillance will become too cheap as companies automate their responses. And if companies give away customer records, wouldn't that encourage gratuitous surveillance?

Privacy advocates also want companies to be up-front about what they charge and alert customers after an investigation has concluded.

"What we don't want is surveillance to become a profit center," said Christopher Soghoian, the ACLU's principal technologist. "It's always better to charge $1. It creates friction, and it creates transparency" because it generates a paper trail.