On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 10:47:16PM -0400, Sandy Harris wrote: > It gets worse. The US has a Communications > Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) > that basically makes it illegal for anyone to sell > phone switches without wiretap capability in the > US. As a result nearly all such switches have > the capability built in. That includes the switches > that various nasty regimes buy.
Expanding on this point -- Once the wiretapping capability is built into the switch, it's often very easy to turn on (by a small bribe to the technician who manages the switch, for example). Even if the wiretapping feature is an added cost extra, generally that means that the code is included in the shipping product and just needs to be enabled by a small hack of the software. Exactly this happened in Greece in 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%9305 It's safe to assume that it's happened many more times that weren't discovered. -andy -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
