worship recklessly drops Nell's point

to convert computer code back into voice.
#
# A portable system about the size of a large briefcase could track and
# decode 36 simultaneous conversations. A larger system, the size of a
# small refrigerator, could follow up to 1,000 conversations.
#
# All could be done without the phone company.
#
# James K. Kallstrom, the FBI's chief of technology, [later made head of the
# FBI's New York office], acknowledged that the agency was one of Mitel's
# largest customers, but denied computers had that capability. [What???]


----


And how many conversations does the government listen to?

For when they took the time to get a court authorization:

* "Above the Law", by David Burnham, ISBN 0-684-80699-1, 1996
*
* ...in 1993, it appears in that year alone the government agents
* listened to something like 810,000 conversations.

Of course, the NSA has stated it needs no warrants and doesn't even consider
the legality of purely domestic wiretaps.

* The Puzzle Palace, Author James Bamford, 1983 revision
*
* P229: "There's your smoking pistol right here." Watters says it is tied
* into the local telephone company circuits, which are interconnected with
* the national microwave telephone system owned by AT&T. Other specialists
* testified to the same thing: purely domestic intercepts.

I would say a MINIMUM of 100 million purely domestic U.S. conversations
are run through NSA keyword monitoring each year.


And who is listening to all our court authorized conversations?

* "Above the Law", by David Burnham, ISBN 0-684-80699-1, 1996
*
* Under a little-noticed section of a 1986 law, Congress dropped the
* requirement that only the FBI's high-priced Special Agents could
* listen to the tapes. The FBI now hires low-cost clerks for what must
* be extreme


.