Re: FBI seeks huge wiretapping system

[futplex@pseudonym.com (Futplex)]

Today's (11/2) NYT carries a Markoff story on The 1% Solution at the top 
left of the front page. The article mentions that the DT appropriation has 
been cut out of the current budget bill (last week ?). It points out that 
since the White House officially plans to veto the current bill anyway, 
they're unlikely to waste too much effort on sticking things into it.

Supposedly they want three zones of wiretap capability: (roughly) 1% in 
cities, 0.5% in suburbs, 0.25% in the country.

We've discussed the grave concern that digital equipment makes everything
much easier to handle. I would like to know what sort of technological 
assurances we could possibly obtain that the arbitrary 1%/0.5%/0.25% figures
couldn't trivially be bumped up to, say, 10%/5%/2.5% with a little bit of
programming. Is this a legitimate worry ?  If the FBI gets its way on this,
how far will we be from the day when 1% is merely a parameter in a wiretap
control program ?  

I don't know enough about telephone switches etc. (digital or otherwise) to
know whether this is just idle speculation.

-Futplex <futplex@pseudonym.com>