In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching system is a very expensive proposition. Eight thousand Leticia Luthors would be bad enough, but a quarter of a million of them is a military-scale proposition and makes drastic measures in automation financially worthwhile.
Although the phone system continues to grow today, the number of human beings employed by telcos has been dropping steadily for years. Phone "operators" now deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all routine operations having been shrugged off onto machines. Consequently, telephone operators are considerably less machine-like nowadays, and have been known to have accents and actual character in their voices. When you reach a human operator today, the operators are rather more "human" than they were in Leticia's day—but on the other hand, human beings in the phone system are much harder to reach in the first place.
Over the first half of the twentieth century, "electromechanical" switching systems of growing complexity were cautiously introduced into the phone system. In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid systems are still in use. But after 1965, the phone system began to go completely electronic, and this is by far the dominant mode today. Electromechanical systems have "crossbars," and "brushes," and other large moving mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than Leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly quickly.
But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon chips, and are lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite durable. They are much cheaper to maintain than even the best electromechanical systems, and they fit into half the space. And with every year, the silicon chip grows smaller, faster, and cheaper yet. Best of all, automated electronics work around the clock and don't have salaries or health insurance.
There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of computer-chips. When they do break down, it is a daunting challenge to figure out what the heck has gone wrong with them. A broken cordboard generally had a problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad software can be so subtle as to be practically theological.
If you want a mechanical system to do something new, then you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces out of it, and wire in new pieces. This costs money. However, if you want a chip to do something new, all you have to do is change its software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap. You don't even have to see the chip to change its program. Even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much. A chip with program X doesn't look one whit different from a chip with program Y.
With the proper codes and sequences, and access to specialized phone-lines, you can change electronic switching systems all over America from anywhere you please.
And so can other people. If they know how, and if they want to, they can sneak into a microchip via the special phonelines and diddle with it, leaving no physical trace at all. If they broke into the operator's station and held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious. If they broke into a telco building and went after an electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at least leave many traces. But people can do all manner of amazing things to computer switches just by typing on a keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today. The extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life about any computer on a network.
Security experts over the past twenty years have insisted, with growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability of computers represents an entirely new level of risk, of unknown but obviously dire potential to society. And they are right.
An electronic switching station does pretty much everything Letitia did, except in nanoseconds and on a much larger scale. Compared to Miss Luthor's ten thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching computer, 60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines. And the current AT&T system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.