It is widely believed that the Police, the FBI, and other government agencies tap many more phones than they admit in public. This is not counting the NSA's monitoring of all the international traffic they can stuff into a computer. Now the FBI wants telephone switch manufactures to supply them with desktop phone tapping technology. Real-time delivery of all conversations straight to the agent's desk. This is scary, but it might an opportunity. Given that congress is likely to eventually allow the FBI this tech toy, would you go along with a deal that all taps would really require a court order and that the exact time and location of all taps would eventually be made public? No cheating possible. I believe such an compromise may be possible via cyptographic technology, I've not worked out the details, but here is a sketch of the idea. The legislation authorizing the tapping facilities would require that each tap be activated by a key supplied by a court. Each tap would require a new key. The switching gear would not only enforce the key mechanism, but transmit a record of the tap to some agency outside the court system. Both the courts and this agency would be required to periodically make public all old taps. Part of this information would include tamper-proof sequence codes and signatures to guarantee that all taps were in fact reported. The law would effectively be enforced by the switch hardware. We would not only know how many phones were tapped, but whose phones were tapped. This last would pose a privacy problem, The law could just require tappees being eventually informed of the invasion of their lives, rather than public disclosure. Problems: * We consent to the process, it legitimates phone taps. * The hardware would be in place for massive monitoring of communications if the government could get the public to accept dropping the limitations of the scheme. [It might be possible to limit the abuse by having the switches communicate and not accept anymore than a 1,000 taps a year.] * The lobbying for this would be difficult. Additional opportunity: * By proposing and lobbying for this type of scheme, it could be made obvious that the cops and mega cops want to maintain much closer surveillance than they are willing to admit. However, you'd have to be prepared for them to accept the compromise. They may figure on making all their illegal taps via other means. --efrem