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."

Comments

The news here is

[Chris_Stankowitz]

that they got caught. German laws allow for this, Sloppy work on the part of either the telecom company or the police (or both). If its one thing American Inteligence ( homebound anyway) is good at is keeping the public unaware of these types of things. Is that a good thing? Thats an agrument for another post.

Related News from Finland

[jukal]

Two senior security staff at Finnish telco Sonera have been remanded in custody, charged with breaching customer privacy by allegedly riffling through private telephone records in an attempt to identify an internal mole

Read the rest here. Now, I consider this worse - you can expect policy to breach privacy - but you are not supposed to expect that from a major telco....or...actually...are you?

There is no limit to what we should do!

[reverendG]

The German police believe that over 20,000 people need to have active wiretaps on their phones?

German authorities can only use wiretapping in serious cases such as murder, money laundering, kidnapping or treason.

I think that when there are this many people who are being monitored, there's a problem. Just take a moment and think about the number of people it takes to monitor and administrate that level of surveillance!

Worth Pointing Out

[Anonymous Coward]

This article from 1998 indicated that Germany has had suspected criminals under surveillance for quite some time. So this shouldn't come as much of a surprise. In fact, it was said that several nations in the EU had similar policies in that article. If that is true, then this isn't a good time to be a civil libertarian. Big Brother is watching quite a few of us.

Now here's something to think about: These German police who conducted this were up so sloppy that the bugging information showed up on phone bills. So: how many governments are doing this the right way (i.e. without the public's knowledge?)

Billable wiretaps in New York

[Animats]

Something like this happened in the US about a decade ago, in New York, and it's one of the reasons the FBI pushed CALEA through.

The New York office of the FBI was wiretapping various Mafia types (with some success; they eventually broke the New York Mafia). The taps were done by New York Telephone, and were implemented by ordering a remote extension from the circuit to be tapped to an FBI office. This was a billable service, and it wasn't cheap; the total costs of all those circuits were a strain on the FBI budget.

One month, the FBI didn't pay the bill for one of their "extensions". The billing software then started billing the other party on the line, the person being wiretapped. Big embarassment.

This was part of the motivation behind CALEA. Not only did it hurt the investigation, but it embarassed the FBI. (The FBI is very thin-skinned. "Don't embarass the Bureau" started with Hoover and lives on.)

All this is in one of the books about how the FBI took down the New York Mafia, but I don't have the cite.

Re:inaccessable? Can you say war-dialing?

[tomhudson]

Not just their conversations, bot others as well.

That's what happened up here. Guys were punching into the cops' voicemail, hearing them talk to their informants, making dates with their mistresses, giving their wives excuses for being late so they could keep their "date" with their mistress, etc.

Very embarassing