Sampo Syreeni wrote:Rather it's the fact that the Big
Brother doesn't have the necessary total funds, and so doesn't listen into
a considerable proportion of calls as a whole.
Yet.
As far as we know.
:-)
I agree it's an economic issue, and law enforcement doesn't seem to
listen in on a considerable proportion of calls as a whole at the moment.
But what happens to costs in the future? Remember, it takes 10 years
to get any change to the cellphone/telecommunications infrastructure
deployed, so it pays to think ahead.
By the way, what's the story with those SIGINT planes supposedly
advertised as being able to fly over a city and capture communications
from the whole metropolitan area? John Young had a pointer on his web
site at one point. Do you suppose they might snarf up all the cellphone
traffic they can find, en masse? What proportion of calls would that be,
as a fraction of the whole? One wonders whether your confidence in the
security of cellphone traffic is well-founded.
AWACS-type planes have long had the ability to act as "cell towers," so cell traffic is easily picked-up, if in fact they are doing this. Landline signals are vastly harder to pick up, and I doubt strongly that every minorly-radiating landline signal is being picked up.
Perhaps for very, very targetted signals, but not cruising over general cities, it seems likely to me.
I'm not sure of the context here, but in the past year there were some reports of planes circling over university campuses, and many were hypothesizing that SIGINT was being done on telephone and computer messages. This seemed unlikely to me.
I concluded--and posted on Usenet about my thinking--that some campuses may have been targeted for low-level gamma ray surveys. Kind of a gamma ray version of Shipley's "war driving" maps. Possibly for construction of baseline maps of existing radioisotopes in university labs, hospitals, and private facilities. Then deviations from baseline maps could be identified and inspected in more detail with ground-based vans and black bag ops.
--Tim May
"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." --Samuel Adams
