Slashdot Mirror
Buggy Bugging Backfires On German Police
Alethes writes "The BBC is reporting that German police have been caught bugging cellphones at the expense of criminal suspects who found a unknown and inaccessible voicemail number listed on their bills that was being used to record calls. Telecommunications authorities said that nearly 20,000 lines were currently being tapped."
Here's a something related to chew on . . . especially after last nights election results.
"A little-known amendment in the Senate version of the bill makes it much easier for ISPs to disclose e-mail communications without being served with a warrant, which had been prohibited before the Patriot Act of 2001." - wired
Check it here
"Nein!", according to The Simpsons (German).
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Scheiße - roughly pronounced "Schiess", but I believe "Do'h!" works.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Unfortunately, no
It is illegal for the UK media to report on incidents that involve national security.
Yeah, yeah, laugh as you want, you can even claim that it's rediculeus to claim it has anything to do with national security, laugh while you still have the right..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
-Remember: Mohammed Atta and his crew of butchers, who murdered 3000 Americans on 9/11/01, plotted the entire scheme in Germany-
News to me - where did you get this piece of information, please?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
You're absolutely correct, which just happens to illustrate the fact that in contrast to common belief, The Simpsons is not always correct. It's just that there isn't really a better translation for the "D'oh!" ... "argh", perhabs.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Misconception numero duo, that the German police were attempting to charge suspects for their being wiretapped. No, if you (once again) read the article it is clear that these suspects being charged on their bills WAS the screwup. Obviously the German Police did not want these potential baddies to get a mystery charge on their cell bills and tip them off to the fact that they were being bugged.
Finally, it doesn't appear to be, at least completely, the German Police's fault. What happened is, they fiddled their mobbys (the article doesn't spell it all out but by all appearances with an appropriate warrant and the cooperation of the phone company) so that when they made a call it would hook up and record the convo into a voicemail box. The phone company upgraded the phone software and the upgrade was incompatible: the bug made the caller get charged for the hook-up to the voicemail box, and that charge tipped them off that something was fishy. Oops.
Anyone who isn't white.
Not quite. All countries in Europe use the GSM network - digital with encryption, packet switching etc. security features (search "GSM encryption" on google if you want more information). So it's much harder to tap into that than to any POTS. Thus it's the obvious that the police goes through the network operator.
Karma. Moderation. Is my
Well, Bundespolizei means Federal Police, so it wouldn't make sense to put a state together with it.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
The voice mailbox was not to track callers, it was to record phone conversations on the phone lines. The billing for the voice mailbox was not supposed to show up at all, but after the software upgrade the owners of the phone lines started being charged for the voice mailboxes that were being used to record their phone conversations, even though they were not actually able to retrieve messages from the mailboxes.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Yes, indeed -- they were even charged for it.