Eavesdropping made easy
The first article in a sporadic series exploring technology
By Sam Bhagwat
Desk Editor
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Recently, phone tapping has taken center stage
due to the Patriot Act and the ongoing debate it
spurred over civil liberties. Phone taps may be
new to you, but its premise dates all the way
back to the 1890Â’s. Its predecessor, telegraph
tapping, was employed during the Civil War by
Union generals at the battle of Vicksburg as well
as on ShermanÂ’s March to the Sea. Union soldiers
would make enterprising raids into enemy
territory and relay Confederate dispatches to
their commanders. These operations provided
important information, but attracting men to
volunteer for the position was made rather more
difficult by the slim likelihood that they would
live to enjoy their fame. A. W. Greely, a Union
general in the Civil War, wrote that there were
“more than three hundred casualties among the operators.”
More recently, phone tapping has involved fewer
battlefield heroics and more technical
sophistication. A telephone can be tapped by
taking an exposed point on the outside phone line
it connects to and attaching a device that can
translate electric current into a pattern of
air-pressure fluctuations that correspond to
sound waves. This could be a normal phone, if
youÂ’re willing to hang around 24/7 waiting for
someone to place a call on a tapped phone; more
commonly, a device is used to allow transmission
of the conversation to a remote location. This is the bug of spy film fame.
This part is fairly simple; there are guides on
the Internet explaining how to tap phone lines
with little more than alligator clips and a
recording device. And official phone tapping,
which previously required technicians, has been
immensely simplified for all phones with digital
phone exchanges (the place where phone calls are
connected).The government can complete the
phone-tapping operation and record the
conversation with only a computer. There is no chance of detection.
Phone tapping starts to get complicated when it
comes to cell phones. The mobile nature of
cellular phones can pose a security threat; one
method for eavesdropping on a cell phone
conversation is to use a device called an
IMSI-catcher, which masquerades as the base
station of the service provider, thus gaining
access to the conversation. This method — similar
to some computer hacking techniques — requires
knowing the location of the subject that you want
to eavesdrop on. But if the general vicinity of
the subject is determined, he or she can be
“zoomed in on” by measuring the “timing advance,”
an adjustment for the distance of the subject to
a base station based on the speed of light.
But the quest for improving cell phone security
is still far from complete and always under
threat from intelligence services seeking to
subvert these measures. Phones that use secure
encryption cannot be easily deciphered or
disabled. But there are still many barriers to
the spread of these phones, such as compatibility
issues and price. And one doesnÂ’t have to wear a
tin-foil hat to realize that the tap-happy German
and Dutch governmentsÂ’ opposition to shutting
down the loopholes that allow eavesdropping means
that the current system is going to be here for a while.
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Gloucester, MA 01931-8008 Email: mailto:jm..._at_tscm.com
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:25 CST