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

[pcw@access.digex.net (Peter Wayner)]

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