I believe the novel implied that the magic box didn't do voice recognition in the sense of identifying the words being spoken. It just said, "Hey, that sounds like Bob Smith on line 42." The point was that these guys were jumping around from phone to phone. But, I agree with you that traffic analysis should be much easier now with all of the ID tags. I think the Clancy box would be too much overkill because people really don't use that many telephones during the day. Especially now that they call carry pocket cellular phones. -Peter