🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov3.090942.1626@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu>
denning@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu writes:

> During the period 1985-1991, court-ordered electronic surveillance 
> conducted by the FBI alone led to 7,324 convictions, almost $300 
> million in fines being levied, over $750 million in recoveries, 
> restitutions, and court-ordered forfeitures, and close to $2 billion in 
> prevented potential economic loss.

Ignoring for the moment the FBI's penchant for inflating dollar
figures, let's take this total of $3.05 billion as gospel.  This works
out to $416,000 of "economic benefit" per conviction.  Not bad, given
Dr. Denning's quoted figure of about $45K per wiretap, even if we
figure that some (I hope a small percentage!) of the wiretaps didn't
lead to a conviction.  (On the other hand, many wiretaps probably
produce more than one conviction.)  This might explain why the
government likes them so much -- they're cost-effective.  Even the
actual $1.05 billion of fines and recoveries make them pretty
profitable.

> According to the 1986 President's 
> Commission on Organized Crime, OC reduces the output of the U.S. 
> economy by $18.2 billion a year (1986 dollars), cost 414,000 jobs, 
> raise consumer prices by 0.3%, and lower per capita personal income by 
> $77.22.

In other words, Organized Crime is a *TINY* drag on the overall
economy, so small that it is almost impossible to measure.  This is
doubly true since the Feds are probably lumping drug activity into OC,
with attendant inflation of "street values" and so forth.

Now for my question, Dr. Denning: if I offered to save you $77.22 per
year and reduce prices by 0.3%, would you be willing to give up a
significant fraction of your personal liberties to achieve this?  Note
that I'm not talking about simple wiretapping; I'm assuming the FBI
were given sufficient police-state powers to completely wipe out all
organized crime, with probable attendant "collateral damage" to
innocent citizens like you, your friends, family, and colleagues.

OK, assuming the answer is "no", then the question is "how much
freedom are you willing to give up in exchange for lesser savings?"
For a lot of us, the answer is "none."  For me, it's actually a
negative number.
--
	Geoff Kuenning   geoff@itcorp.com   uunet!desint!geoff