🚀 go-pugleaf

lines," he said, on the condition of anonymity.
#   
#   He said four companies, including such major firms as Mitel Corporation,
#   a Canadian maker of telecommunications equipment, can design digital
#   decoders 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 1