Tape-Recording at the FBI
In the Martha Stewart trial, the dispute seems to be the following: Stewart met with a US Attorney back in February 2002. There were two note-takers at the meeting - an FBI agent and one on Stewart’sside. They took handwritten notes. The notes don’t match. The prosecution is trying to convict Stewart based on what she said according to the FBI’s version of the notes.
The obvious question is: Why on earth is the FBI still relying on nineteenth-century technology?
Henry Blodget, who’s following the trial, asked the FBI and got this answer:
An FBI spokesperson I talked to said that the agency doesn’t use tape recorders because: 1) with 56 regional offices, 440 satellite offices, and approximately 11,800 agents, it would be expensive (tapes require transcription and transcription is “manpower intensive"); and, 2) if the FBI did institute a recording policy, then in cases in which recording was impossible, defense attorneys would argue that its absence was significant.The first argument is spurious. No one seems to have tried to figure out the costs of tape recording, which are quite low.
Assume that every agent in the FBI gets his own tape recorder, which costs, say $100 (these are government tape recorders, after all.) That works out to about a million dollars. Now assume that you buy a whole bunch of tapes for each recorder, costing, say $100 (again, government tapes.) Another million. Now set up a system to archive the tapes. Assume it costs, say $10,000 per office. We’re talking $5 million or so for all offices. Even better, for that kind of money, you could set up a single digital archive in Washington, with all the audio from all the tapes stored in a single location that can be reached from anywhere on the Internet. All this totals to a one-time cost of about $7 million.
Now for the recurring costs. As for transcription, outsource (ominous music plays in the background) to India, like doctors do for medical transcription. I don’t know what the costs are. But, assuming a buck a page, you could transcribe a million pages for a million dollars. The English-as-second-language transcribers could make mistakes; so have each agent spend a little time every day proof-reading the transcriptions of his meetings from the previous day. All the transcriptions should be archived digitally. That way, if you’re searching for something, you could perform a quick search across every meeting that everyone in the FBI has ever had with a witness or suspect! Then you could get the audio and listen for yourself. Instantly. From anywhere in the world.
So we’re talking about a one-time cost of $7 million, and a recurring cost of a million or two every year. Let’s double those costs to budget for overruns, like good bureaucrats would do. For an agency with a budget of $22 billion, the cost of the entire tape-recording system would be just a rounding error.
-- PoliPundit