The other problem for this technique is battery life. Let's assume we can shove a firmware update/hack/whatever into the phone to enable snooping, it's still transmitting when acting as a bug. Even if this feature is only enabled when the phone is geolocated somewhere "interesting", the reduction in battery life is going to be significant. If your phone has a standby time of days, and you're used to shoving it on the charger rarely, then suddenly you're doing it several times a day, you're going to notice. Even if you are the dumb, stupid criminal the government likes to tell us that surveillance always catches.
I suppose that it could be argued that you could use silence detection etc. to reduce power used, but most phones are pretty aggressive at power saving already. I doubt there are huge savings to be made which haven't been implemented already. Ian. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Taral Sent: Monday, 4 December 2006 2:26 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: John Ioannidis; cryptography@metzdowd.com Subject: Re: cellphones as room bugs On 12/3/06, Thor Lancelot Simon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It's been a while since I built ISDN equipment but I do not think this > is correct: can you show me how, exactly, one uses Q.931 to instruct > the other endpoint to go off-hook? That's the same question I have. I don't remember seeing anything in the GSM standard that would allow this either. -- Taral <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "You can't prove anything." -- Gödel's Incompetence Theorem --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
