Justice Department seeks more than 1,700 secret warrants

The Justice Department made 1,745 requests to a secret court for authority to wiretap or search for evidence in terrorism and espionage investigations last year.

That's according to an April 30 letter from the department to the Senate that was first reported Thursday by the Federation of American Scientists.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret to hear classified evidence from government attorneys, did not reject any of the requests, though judges did require modifications to 30 requests.

It was an increase over 2010, when the department made 1,579 requests.

The FBI also made 16,511 national security letter requests for information regarding 7,201 people last year. The letters allow officials to collect virtually unlimited kinds of sensitive, private information like financial and phone records.

That is down from 2010, when 24,287 requests for information regarding 14,212 people were made.