Tapping Phone Calls
Discussion
House/land line phones can be tapped at the exchange. No need to go near your house or handset.
As for mobiles, anyone with the right receiver equipment can listen to the call if they can intercept the radio signal; it's not easy for joe public due to the nature of the signal but it is technically possible for the right organisation.
And like landlines, your call goes through the mobile providers central equipment at some stage and so could (technically) be tapped there, again without access to your handset.
Just assume that someone is listening to you and you wont go far wrong.
I am just dealing with the technical issues here, not whether it's legal or not.
>> Edited by arcturus on Saturday 1st January 22:01
As for mobiles, anyone with the right receiver equipment can listen to the call if they can intercept the radio signal; it's not easy for joe public due to the nature of the signal but it is technically possible for the right organisation.
And like landlines, your call goes through the mobile providers central equipment at some stage and so could (technically) be tapped there, again without access to your handset.
Just assume that someone is listening to you and you wont go far wrong.
I am just dealing with the technical issues here, not whether it's legal or not.
>> Edited by arcturus on Saturday 1st January 22:01
arcturus said:
As for mobiles, anyone with the right receiver equipment can listen to the call if they can intercept the radio signal
Did anyone see the film "Hig Heels and Low Lifes"? Featured intercepts of mobile phones. Probably not real, but worth watching to see Minnie Driver in a nurses uniform!
My job has taken me into a few telephone exchanges, without names or places I can recall being on one such site and marvelling at the neat banks of wires and connectors that ran out to provide all the houses in local area with their telephone conections.
In a couple of places, amongst all of this there were additional cables with crocodile clips connecting extra wires - what's these I asked? 'Ahhh, umm, wink wink, cough, cough, those circuits are under test, if you know what I mean'.
More interesting however is I know a guy who worked for 'Symbian' - that's the crowd who developed the software that runs on mobile phones. Whenever we had a tech talk about certain 'things' he would remove the battery from his mobile phone.
My understanding of this is was that mobile phones can be tapped in such a way as they act as a bugging device. That is, you the user would not even know that the phone had been activated and was transmitting everything it could hear.
Now my field is satellite systems, but I've read a few text books on mobile phone communication systems and I've never come across anything that would indicate this can actually be done but you have to wonder when yo witness this behaviour from someone from the inside...
For sure, there is no such thing as privacy in this digital age and given physical access to the right places/equipment any communication can be intercepted.
best
Ex
In a couple of places, amongst all of this there were additional cables with crocodile clips connecting extra wires - what's these I asked? 'Ahhh, umm, wink wink, cough, cough, those circuits are under test, if you know what I mean'.
More interesting however is I know a guy who worked for 'Symbian' - that's the crowd who developed the software that runs on mobile phones. Whenever we had a tech talk about certain 'things' he would remove the battery from his mobile phone.
My understanding of this is was that mobile phones can be tapped in such a way as they act as a bugging device. That is, you the user would not even know that the phone had been activated and was transmitting everything it could hear.
Now my field is satellite systems, but I've read a few text books on mobile phone communication systems and I've never come across anything that would indicate this can actually be done but you have to wonder when yo witness this behaviour from someone from the inside...
For sure, there is no such thing as privacy in this digital age and given physical access to the right places/equipment any communication can be intercepted.
best
Ex
arcturus said:
As for mobiles, anyone with the right receiver equipment can listen to the call if they can intercept the radio signal; it's not easy for joe public due to the nature of the signal but it is technically possible for the right organisation.
Actually from what I, ahem, hear mobile phones use very low-level encryption, and are relatively easy to decode...
it was a lot easier in the early/mid 90s as people used analogue mobile phones with no encryption. You could buy radio scanners (still can) for a couple hundred quid and listen in at the 900mhz+ area to people's phone calls!
then they changed to digital ones and it became harder - a, because most of them operate around 1800mhz and radio scanners that would go up that high were prohibitevly expensive, and b - cos they needed to be decoded by PC in real time, way back when - the hardware to do such things was in the hands of the govt only.
for extra bonus points though, you could decode pocsag messages (pager stuff) - by listening in to the pocsag frequency with a scanner, piping the audio into a PC sound card, and using a pocsag decoder to read it - all there used to be was taxi related stuff etc but you used to get medical emergency information etc - and sadly information of quite a few deaths (doctors pagers etc). Moreso if you lived relatively close to a hospital.
You can decode ACARS information too, again - tune a scanner to the right frequency, pipe the pops and squeals into a PC and bingo - location, direction, altitude, carrier and callsign information of aircraft around your local vicinity.
It's really not that hard to do at all!
>> Edited by CB-Dave on Sunday 2nd January 00:57
then they changed to digital ones and it became harder - a, because most of them operate around 1800mhz and radio scanners that would go up that high were prohibitevly expensive, and b - cos they needed to be decoded by PC in real time, way back when - the hardware to do such things was in the hands of the govt only.
for extra bonus points though, you could decode pocsag messages (pager stuff) - by listening in to the pocsag frequency with a scanner, piping the audio into a PC sound card, and using a pocsag decoder to read it - all there used to be was taxi related stuff etc but you used to get medical emergency information etc - and sadly information of quite a few deaths (doctors pagers etc). Moreso if you lived relatively close to a hospital.
You can decode ACARS information too, again - tune a scanner to the right frequency, pipe the pops and squeals into a PC and bingo - location, direction, altitude, carrier and callsign information of aircraft around your local vicinity.
It's really not that hard to do at all!
>> Edited by CB-Dave on Sunday 2nd January 00:57
CB-Dave said:
it was a lot easier in the early/mid 90s as people used analogue mobile phones with no encryption.
Yep, used to do that in the '80s during the lunch break at the Govt research dept I worked in. With our scanners we were able to graphically view the whole spectrum and then tune in to both ends of the conversation. (Assuming both were local)
CB-Dave said:
It's really not that hard to do at all!
I agree, it's just that your average bloke in the street wouldn't have a clue how to go about it.
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