re estimating wiretap costs benefits in article apr kronos arc nasa gov hanson kronos arc nasa gov robin hanson writes 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 you seem to be assuming that all arrests are of equal value and that the use of wiretaps is spread uniformly among them given this comparatively tiny number of wiretaps and the associated difficulty and cost involved judges technicians etc i expect that law enforcement reserves the use of wiretaps for the most valuable cases since the value of an arrest can vary over an enormous range eg jaywalking mass murder i think your million estimate may be too low by a couple of orders of magnitude
