re estimating wiretap costs benefits in article apr kronos arc nasa gov hanson kronos arc nasa gov robin hanson writes i m attempting to write a serious policy paper examining whether the proposed wiretap or clipper chip is a cost effective tool for police investigation that is ignoring concerns about government intrusions into individual privacy is the value of easy wiretaps to investigators greater than the cost to the communications industry and their customers to support this wiretap technology a rough estimate suggests that wiretaps are worth about five million dollars per year to u s law enforcement agencies in u s wiretaps led to arrests while total police expenditures of billion led to million arrests ref us statistical abstracts i m working on estimating this wiretap benefit more accurately but i d like to ask hardware experts out there to help me with estimating the costs of the new proposed wiretap technology please send me quotable citeable estimates for how many chips which would need to be made per year to keep all phones with wiretap chips how much would it cost to make each chip how much did it cost to develop this technology in the first place how much more would supporting hardware people etc cost per chip what percentage cheaper would encryption chips and support have been if private enterprise could compete to meet customer encryption needs what percentage of phone traffic would be taken up by the proposed law enforcement blocks what is the total cost of handling all phone traffic per year put another way the question i m asking is what if each police agency that wanted a particular wiretap had to pay for it being charged their share of the full social cost of forcing communication to be wiretap compatible would they choose to buy such wiretaps or would they find it more cost effective to instead investigate crimes in other ways robin hanson hanson ptolemy arc nasa gov ms nasa ames research center moffett field ca male terrace fremont ca first what the fuck is nasa doing wasting my tax dollars doing policy papers on stuff far outside of their purvew mission second this isn t a problem of economics this is a problem of the incremental accumulation of police state powers by our government how exactly do you put a price on the loss of freedom of a society maybe use the dollars life lost calculations for the extra people killed by the gov the pain and suffering cases for those tortured the dollars life lost caused by the inevitable collapse of the economy and all the secondary effects of diseases diet etc plus the inevitable collapse of the economy as the gov controls it becomes corrupt etc do us a favor resign rather than right this paper for nasa go do useful work for the society lew lew glendenning rlglende netcom com perspective is worth iq points niels bohr or somebody like that
