From: Zhahai.Stewart@f93.n104.z1.fidonet.org (Zhahai Stewart)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: New Developments on Digital Telephony
Date: 17 Nov 92 23:07:26 GMT
Article-I.D.: puddle.20499.2B09F9FD
Organization: FidoNet node 1:104/93 - Adelante, Boulder CO


 As a punster and sometimes satirist, I was looking into Peter's
 attempted parody for some chuckles and/or insights:

 d>   [Director] said that is not enough.  Currently there is one FBI
 d>   agent for every 12,200 Americans, which means that most phone
 d>   calls cannot be monitored even if FBI wanted to.  He proposed
 d>   hiring 100,000,000 new agents so that one can be assigned full
 d>   time to listen to each American telephone line.  He suggested
 d>   this could be the massive jobs program that Bill has been
 d>   looking for -- it would virtually eliminate unemployment in the
 d>   country and go well beyond his promise to the American people.

 Y'know this might be a funny parody, if it revealed that the basis
 for concern about expanded wiretapping technology was flawed.  
 Unfortunately, that position was invented by the opponents, as a
 now discredited strawman argument.  Nobody has suggested that the 
 FBI plans to constantly monitor every phone conversation; the civil 
 liberties concerns are with possibly substantially expanded monitoring 
 (tho not ad absurdum), combined with possibly less effective 
 monitoring of illegal taps than with current systems.  Also, local 
 police have been mentioned as possibly more of a danger than the FBI; 
 given that the taps would serve both FBI and other LE agencies, this 
 is a serious concern.

 Future concerns, over the coming decades after the "supertap" system
 was in place, include better computer assisted scanning of voice
 conversations.  If two decades from now the cost of scanning a voice
 channel drops dramatically, how many folks think that Law Enforcement
 will say "well, one of the key issues in the balance we determined
 back in the 90's was that our labor costs would limit the total amount
 of tapping we could make use of no matter how extensive the technical
 ability; now that this has changed, let's think about reducing our
 intercept ability".  Hah.  Whatever privacy is given away in 1993 will 
 never be regained, even if "labor cost" drops dramatically.  Any 
 position on such a deep infrastructural change in government wiretapping
 power must be primarily evaluated for its impact twenty years down 
 the road, not just in 1994.  Thus current labor costs have never been
 the key issue.  I would hope we could avoid such shortsightedness in
 such an important debate, which will determine a lot about the 
 interaction between privacy and law enforcemnt for a generation or two
 to come.

 A parody whose humor and value lie in exposing the ridiculousness of a 
 discussion position which nobody holds, and which was invented by one 
 side to falsely attribute to the other, in order to ridicule them, 
 doesn't really have much content, does it?  No gut laughs here, just a 
 sad sigh.  Adding smileys wouldn't impove the lack of content, alas.

 Please, no further shots at the strawman argument.  Nothing is served.
 Those who built the strawman have demolished it already; those who want
 to seriously debate the real issues would like to move on.

 A good satire or parody is a delight.  A biased hack job is a hack job.
 There is a difference.  It takes no skill, and produces no accolades,
 to invent a position for the other side of a debate and then ridicule it.
    ~z~


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