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

At 4:05 PM 11/21/95, Peter Wayner wrote:
>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.
...

The manpower shortage can be solved by moving the listening step offshore,
perhaps to one of the Carribbean islands that processes credit card slips.

Even cheaper would be to subcontract out the listening to the relatively
impoverished, but well-educated and English-trained, former Soviet bloc
nations. For example, Romania or Bulgaria, or even Russia. They may still
have the old listening infrastructure in place, although I hear that Stasi
headquarters in the former DDR is now an acupuncture clinic.

--Tim May

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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

> Romania or Bulgaria, or even Russia. They may still have
> the old listening infrastructure in place, although I
> hear that Stasi headquarters in the former DDR is now an
> acupuncture clinic.

The Stasi listening infrastructure wasn't solely in their
headquarters. Listening stations for terrestrial frequencies were
spread along the borders, notably here is the station on the Brocken,
a mountain in the Harz. The central station for interception of
satellite traffic (read: international telephone communication, even
when not entering or leaving the country) was located in Biesenthal, a
small town near Berlin.

It's hard to reconstruct what part of interception took place in the
Stasi HQ, my guess is that all international telephone traffic leaving
or entering the country was intercepted there. For technical reasons
it was impossible to intercept all domestic traffic from a single
central location, the telephone system worked on a purely mechanical
basis. It seems that almost all of the telephone surveillance
equipment was destroyed during the revolution or shortly after.

Things look different for the mentioned radio equipment. The Stasi
used a combination of Russian and self-made technology. The
top-of-the-notch Russian equipment is back in Russia. But most of the
Russian equipment was sold by the Russian guards (their pay is
_really_ low, even more so when compared to western money), the Stasi
equipment was forgotten about and eventually stolen. This equipment is
now mainly in the hands of about 3 or 4 individuals.

Timothy C. May writes:
> At 4:05 PM 11/21/95, Peter Wayner wrote:
> >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?> ...
> 
> The manpower shortage can be solved by moving the listening step offshore,
> perhaps to one of the Carribbean islands that processes credit card slips.

Am I the only person who thought that the point was to be able to
selectively target certain areas but not necessarily all areas? For
instance, lets say the known criminal Tim May is going to be in some
place for a while -- by conducting roving taps of all conversations, I
can find him. 1% capacity should be enough to make that practical. As
another example, lets say there is some sort of political insurgency
building up in some city -- presumably, one could devote all one's
roving manpower to just that place for a few weeks and crush it.

I can see no conventionally legitimate need or way to exploit the
capability, but with unconventional and illegitimate techinques...

Perry