Are there enough FBI agents to handle Digital Telephony?????

Has anyone ever done the math on the FBI's new wire tapping
proposals and determined whether they'll have enough agents to
do all of the listening? Doesn't a court ordered wire tap
require that people listen in and screen the recordings. Does
this have to be in real time? I can't remember, but I think
there is a fairly onerous evidentiary chain required to use this
technology.

For instance, if 1% of America is on the phone during the peak
hours of the day, then that puts 2.5 million Americans on the
phone or 1.25 million conversations. If the FBI wants access to
1% of that, that is still 12,500 simulataneous conversations.
That would seem to imply 12,500 people to listen to the tapes,
right? Would that take agents off the streets?

12,500 agents would cost $1.2 billion a year if they each cost
about $100,000 in salary and benefits. But we need to account
for vacations, shift work and testifying the trials of the drug
lords who are sent to jail. Let's assume that you only need
1/10th the people to handle the two evening shifts. That gives
you a cost of $1.4 billion before vacations. Adding 40% to cover
vacation and weekends puts you close to $2 billion. Let's round
up.

So it would cost $2 billion just to use the information here.
This leads me to believe that they're thinking of building
automatic voice recognition equiptment in the future. What does
anyone think of the numbers?

-Peter Wayner

moroni@scranton.com writes:

 >    If you ask me if there is something for them to worry about I have to 
 > in all good conscience say yes , if you ask if there is something for us 
 > to worry about again I have to say yes. I don't know if there is even a 
 > common ground for both sides to work towards because terrorism has grown 
 > to include the homegrown variety .

what are you talking about? there has always been homegrown terrorism.
at various times in the past it has been much more intense than it is
now. read a little bit about the history of the labor movement in this
country (ie, in the united states of america).

josh

> For instance, if 1% of America is on the phone during the peak
> hours of the day, then that puts 2.5 million Americans on the
> phone or 1.25 million conversations. If the FBI wants access to
> 1% of that, that is still 12,500 simulataneous conversations.
> That would seem to imply 12,500 people to listen to the tapes,
> right? Would that take agents off the streets?

On the other hand, if you only want to collect rough background
information about people who might become significant later, it is
enough to store the conversations in a computer (storage is orders of
magnitude cheaper than the man-time to listen to the tapes), and only
listen the tapes if the person becomes interesting.

Besides, computer technology is approaching the point where you can
eliminate the human from the link entirely, except for final
verification.

1. Speech recognition already works quite well.  There was an article
about a 20.000 word speaker-independent system a few years ago,
operating 1/7th of real time on an alpha workstation.

2. Automatic speaker recognition from voice works quite well if my
understanding is correct.  (Useful for picking up interesting
conversations for futher analysis when you get them from sources you
don't normally monitor).

3. Computers have been able to pick up potentially interesting
conversations by keywords for decades.  Also useful for picking up
interesting conversations for further analysis from sources you don't
monitor very actively.  (Of course, you can additionally use phone
numbers, mobile phone *phone* identification codes, etc.)

4. A lot of work is being done in classifying transcript based on
their content, on message understanding.  In other words, lot of the
analysis work can be automated now or in near future.  The computer
can then answer questions from the data and for example select
individuals for futher analysis based on complex criteria.

5. A lot of work is being done on data mining (i.e., finding new data
from small pieces of individual data in a database, such as purchase
logs, etc.).  This is one of the hot topics in database conferences
right now.

6. Research is being done in massive databases.  There was an
Intelligence Community research initiative a couple of years ago on
massive databases; if my memory serves me right, they were talking
about 2-3 *petabytes* (10^12) as the size of the final database (no,
it was not gigabytes and it was not terabytes).  I believe I still
have the announcement saved somewhere if somebody wants it.


All of these technologies are feasible now or in near future.

Then add a little spices: the hundreds of thousands of surveillance TV
cameras around (did you know that there is a computer system that can
recognize and look up 25 faces per second from a database of a million
faces - used to control football huligans and shoplifters for
instance, but has other uses as well), car movement records from
highway payment systems, purchase records obtained from
credit card companies, banks and retail chains, link up to medical
records, tax databases, employment records, etc.  Add full knowledge
of flight and other travel reservations, some fax, e-mail and telegram
intercepts.

Now, what have you got (besides effective tools for finding criminals)?

    Tatu

Don't the numbers include all types of interceptions, both wiretaps and 
records of what number you call?

You also don't need to listen live. Recording media is cheap these days. 
Record all calls, put into a database keyed by time and number called, 
refer to it later.

-rich

There is and probably never will be a shortage of people to carry on 
wire tapping . The term agent could be all encompassing in the future to 
include but not be limited to the hiring of ex-federally employed 
personnel with the talents or capacity for the talent to do wiretapping. 
In other words there are any number of ex-CIA ,DEA, ex-military who if 
were hired would actually save the government investigation time and 
costs because they have allready gone through security clearance. Add to 
that the fact that most if not all FBI personnel have gone through a 
light wiretap course to famililarize them with the rudiments of the craft.
   All these figures add up to cover the taps in case a disaster of the 
terroristic kind should happen. I feel that numbers are there to worry 
people but that what the FBI is worrying about is whether it can cover 
large ground if there is a siege like state in this country.HOWEVER, 
there will allways be those that opportunistically take advantage of 
circumstances to set up their own invisible little feifdoms along the 
political and social terrain. 
   If you ask me if there is something for them to worry about I have to 
in all good conscience say yes , if you ask if there is something for us 
to worry about again I have to say yes. I don't know if there is even a 
common ground for both sides to work towards because terrorism has grown 
to include the homegrown variety .
 
                     Deirdre

This discussion is beginning to resemble one about the telephone system
about 50 years ago.  A national phone system was considered an impossibilty
by many.  This is because even if AT&T  employed every female >18 years 
old as a telephone operators there weren't enough to plug and unplug all 
the connections on the all the switchboards. 

Regards:
-arc

Arley Carter
Tradewinds Technologies, Inc.
email: ac@hawk.twinds.com
www: http://www.twinds.com

"Trust me. This is a secure product. I'm from <insert your favorite 
corporation of government agency>."
 
 On Tue, 21 Nov 1995, Moroni wrote:

>     There is and probably never will be a shortage of people to carry on 
> wire tapping . The term agent could be all encompassing in the future to 
> include but not be limited to the hiring of ex-federally employed 
> personnel with the talents or capacity for the talent to do wiretapping. 
> In other words there are any number of ex-CIA ,DEA, ex-military who if 
> were hired would actually save the government investigation time and 
> costs because they have allready gone through security clearance. Add to 
> that the fact that most if not all FBI personnel have gone through a 
> light wiretap course to famililarize them with the rudiments of the craft.
>    All these figures add up to cover the taps in case a disaster of the 
> terroristic kind should happen. I feel that numbers are there to worry 
> people but that what the FBI is worrying about is whether it can cover 
> large ground if there is a siege like state in this country.HOWEVER, 
> there will allways be those that opportunistically take advantage of 
> circumstances to set up their own invisible little feifdoms along the 
> political and social terrain. 
>    If you ask me if there is something for them to worry about I have to 
> in all good conscience say yes , if you ask if there is something for us 
> to worry about again I have to say yes. I don't know if there is even a 
> common ground for both sides to work towards because terrorism has grown 
> to include the homegrown variety .
>  
>                      Deirdre
>