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