May 5, 2008
In Pellicano Case, Lessons in Wiretapping Skills
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
LOS ANGELES — The wiretapping trial of Anthony
Pellicano, the accused sleuth to the stars and
irrepressible eavesdropper, has offered much
fodder for celebrity watchers over its two-month
run, including courtroom cameos by the comedians
Chris Rock and Garry Shandling.
But the trial, which went to the jury last week,
offered arguably more for people who enjoy talk
of encryption software, code-wiping booby traps
or the low-tech secrets of phone company
networks. It has brought into focus some
startling technological revelations, provoked
intriguing questions and even taught some lessons
to technophiles — criminally inclined or not.
Here, through various witnesses, are a few of the disclosures:
Wiretapping is really, really easy. And not just
for the government. Anyone sitting in on the
Pellicano trial (and staying awake during the
telecom testimony) could walk away ready to
intercept phone calls after a quick stop at
RadioShack for less than $50 in equipment.
Amateur spooks and crooks need only to learn
which pair of wires, known as a cable pair, is
associated with someoneÂ’s phone number to tap it.
The wires can be found in a curbside neighborhood
“b-box,” if you don’t have the passkey to a
central office. (Mr. Pellicano routinely had
photographs taken of the b-box nearest to a
subjectÂ’s location. But prosecutors said he also
had an accomplice visiting phone company central offices late at night.)
Every phone company service technician is given
copies of two keys that can open nearly all of
Southern CaliforniaÂ’s b-boxes, and retired
technicians apparently keep them. Many boxes are
not locked at all. Central offices, which can be
entered by technicians at all hours, are also often unsupervised.
Not to get all paranoid on you, but. ... All Mr.
Pellicano needed to carve a niche as a “private
ear” was the help of one popular phone company
worker. Prosecutors say a field technician from
SBC Communications (now AT&T), Rayford Turner,
who was a bit of a ladiesÂ’ man, prevailed upon a
small group of middle-age female SBC dispatchers
to give him whatever data he requested: toll
records, cable pairs, names, phone numbers and so
on. They continued to do so long after he retired.
One of his abettors said that she tried to cover
her tracks by typing “ERR” in an SBC database, to
suggest she had accidentally pulled up the wrong
customerÂ’s records. But other confidential
databases did not record any electronic
footprints, and still donÂ’t, five years later, according to testimony.
Though its defenses were easily breached, the
phone company apparently was not prepared to help
prosecute illicit wiretaps. The tap that became
Mr. PellicanoÂ’s undoing was found by a service
technician at a central office. But after
removing it, she threw it out without tracing
where the wires led — leaving jurors, five years
later, to use their imaginations.
Phone “sweeps” offer false security. There are
many companies that offer wiretap detection
services. But these services are meant to pick up
devices on the premises of the target. If the tap
is elsewhere, they are useless. When Mr.
Pellicano wanted to hear the calls of someone who
lived outside his area code, prosecutors say, he
rented an apartment nearby and had Mr. Turner run
the duplicated phone line into it. There it would
be plugged into a Macintosh computer that would
record a new digital audio file each time the
subjectÂ’s receiver was lifted off the hook.
But when the phone to be tapped was near Mr.
Pellicano’s offices — say, on Rodeo Drive — the
detection became easier. Prosecutors say a
special set of undocumented phone lines ran
directly from the mainframe of the phone
companyÂ’s Beverly Hills central office to a phone
closet across the hall from the entrance to Mr.
PellicanoÂ’s offices and then to a bank of
computers in a locked “war room” inside. These
lines allowed Mr. Pellicano to monitor calls
across Beverly Hills without even stepping outside.
For all his wiretapping prowess, however, Mr.
Pellicano could not tap cellphones — a glaring
deficiency in Los Angeles, where many people get
as much work done in their cars as in their offices.
All the kingÂ’s horses cannot beat Serpent. In the
1990s, Louis Freeh, director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation at the time, warned that
new encryption technology would help
cybercriminals elude detection and prosecution.
Libertarians and technology adherents countered
that this was a small price to pay for privacy and the security of e-commerce.
The person who programmed Mr. PellicanoÂ’s wiretap
software was a college dropout named Kevin
Kachikian, a quirky self-taught man who took the
stand last month wearing white socks and sandals
and insisting he thought Mr. Pellicano was only beta-testing the system.
His software incorporated an encryption
algorithm, Serpent, that the governmentÂ’s
code-breakers have not been able to crack.
Serpent, which can be downloaded free, was a mere
runner-up in 1997 in a competition for a new
national encryption standard, but experts say its
128-bit key would require trillions of years for
all the computers in the world to crack.
The F.B.I. seized hundreds of digital audio files
from Mr. PellicanoÂ’s computers in 2002. Scores
have never been decrypted by the agency. So
Serpent proved as impregnable as advertised — and
some evidence, as Mr. Freeh predicted, might never be recovered.
Even Serpent cannot guard against human error.
During the Â’90s encryption debate, privacy
advocates said that law enforcement would still
be able to catch the bad guys by figuring out
their passwords through other means, like
burglary, bribery, blackmail or guesswork.
Indeed, the F.B.I. decrypted scores of Mr.
PellicanoÂ’s recordings after noticing that some
of his pass phrases were written into the
software’s source code itself — a rookie mistake,
cryptology experts say. Several incorporated the
word “omertà ,” Italian for the Mafia’s code of
silence. Another password, required to avoid
setting off an irreversible “wipe” of the
wiretapping software and any audio files, was the
given name of PellicanoÂ’s son, Luca, who is said
to have been named for Luca Brasi, the “Godfather” hit man.
These discoveries let prosecutors listen to
recordings in which Mr. Pellicano bragged about
his wiretapping ability and vowed that no one on
earth would ever learn of it — proving that a
code of silence is not too useful if you never stop blabbing about it.
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:16 CST