W-2

My wife has worked for GTE/Verizon for over thirty years. Verizon is the largest ISP in the nation and rents equipment and services to the likes of AOL, NetZero, and others.

She has had federal agents come to her switchroom with a warrant for a tapand she has followed Verizon policy, she doesn't do anything at all until her boss gets there. When he arrives he examines the warrant, and then refuses the tap. Upper levels and corporate legals arrive within an hour and they determine that Verizon is not obligated to obey a warrant unchallenged. A court date is set and they all show up on that date. EVERY TIME Verizon has prevailed in court and did not have to tap any phones.

When Bush decided he needed to monitor the nations comm sysytems for terrorist activity, it all started again with the warrants.

Verizon, though, offered their expertise and agreed to set up a MUX scanner. It is similar to a police scanner.

The equipment was attached to the MUX(multiplexer) units that were uplinked to the COMSAT. Incoming and outgoing traffic was then limited to certain specific telephone numbers or locations. Arab banks, CAIR offices, overseas financial companies where the terrorist organizations were known to do business. The MUX scanners would query all 64 ins and 64 outs for activity on those numbers and places ONLY. If traffic was detected, the scanners would revert to HEAR mode. In HEAR mode they are voice recognizers and are programmed to listen for certain words in certain languges. (GTE invented fiber optics so this is easy) Only when specific wording was detected on specific line numbers did it revert to LISTEN. That's where the feds cleared the switchroom of ALL but a single Verizon employee and a single FBI or NSA operative. If they believed they had scored a "cinch" they would record it and the fed guy would split and have it in front of a judge within an hour.

So, we DO have the thechnology to listen ONLY to what we want to. My wife would never place a tap on a phoneline indiscriminately.

AND, the feds were already told that software able to do that very same scanning(looking for coeds downloading music illegaly) would take five years and near $800M to produce. The RIAA passed on it.

Glenn

Thank you for the information