Anyway, one of the wiring topologies in Cambridge, and some parts of
Boston was to take one huge cable and pass it into each basement
going from building to building in a straight line path instead of
using telephone poles, or making service drops. The cable was
terminated in each basement so that if you had a 300 pair cables you
would see 300 terminals. In a few lucky place the basement may have
served as a junction point in which case you may have a dozen or more
cables, and over a thousand junction points in the basement of a
single brownstone. Even today many of these cables are still actively
used, and an eavesdropper can listen in to all of his neighbors by
just clipping on to the punch block in the basement of his house.
As there are many, many Washington insiders living in the Harvard
University area this presents an extremely interesting security
problem as any of their neighbors can (cough-cough) listen in to the
inner workings of the political machine.
There is a similar problem with some of the older, pre-80's
townhouses in Georgetown (DC area), and in a number of the commercial
basements in Crystal City, but by far the biggest weakness is in
Cambridge in the area just North of Harvard (between Mass Ave. and
the River), and in downtown Boston (along Commonwealth, Newbury, etc
and BackBay). We also see it in some of the residential building
strings around the State Capital Building/Beacon Hill, and in Roxbury.
-jma
At 10:45 AM 4/7/2006, d..._at_geer.org wrote:
>kondrak writes:
> >Bruce is right on on this one:
> >
> >http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70591-0.html
> >
> >By Bruce Schneier
> >Apr, 06, 2006
> >
> >There are basically four ways to eavesdrop on a telephone call.
> >...
>
>
>My grandmother was a switchboard operator
>in a small town. Back then, Bell Telephone
>selected operators based on character of the
>person -- literally questioning their virtue
>and doing what today would be called a reference
>check. Why? Operators were totally enabled
>to eavesdrop. As I grew up on a party line
>with live operators, meaning not only the
>operator but also all the neighbors could
>eavesdrop, I/we never trusted the phone at
>all. This and the cost meant the phone was
>used for important things, never for mere
>conversation. I suspect that the 1928
>Supreme Court decision that a wiretap was
>not a violation of anything stemmed from the
>fact that eavesdropping was inherent to the
>phone system itself and thus the requirement
>for a warrant would effectively have criminalized
>my grandmother and everyone on my street.
>
>--dan
>
>[ our number was 1417, the underwear factory
>where my dad worked was 628 ]
>
>
>
>
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:19 CST