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."
what's the German translation for "Do'h!"
How in the hell do you manage to do this? I can understand if it was done by a hacker or novice phone tapper. These guys are supposed to be pros. I guess you could say that their cover is blown. Funny Germans.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
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.
This headline is almost good enough to be a contender in the Favorite Past Slashdot Headline.... poll!
Buggy bugging, ha!
As with the sun's light
My mom was magnificent
Unquestionable
Now they've given Ashcroft an idea to both monitor possible terrorists AND increase revenue for the US govertment...
:)
Record all of their conversations in voicemails, then charge them for the priviledge. Go Patriot Act!
It's listed on their bills... I just hope they weren't charged for it.
what exactly is a mud-person?
Hacking most voicemail boxes is so simple because of the simple password.
Not to mention war-dialing the number trying all possible passwords from a land line.
Not surprising. I saw a program that said before the wall came down East Germany had something like 80 - 85% of the population under surveillance.
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
If it had happened in England the subject could have been, "Buggy Bugging Backfires On British Bobbies."
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
How many people are concerned that German police MAY have been involved in illegal wiretapping?
Now, ask yourself if your concerned with the quality of the software doing your billing at any number of companies..
"Whoops, we didn't intend to share your personal data with 'Spammers-R-Us', it was a technical glitch during an upgrade. Sorry."
Maybe if the German police can levy some damages on the phone company, we can feel better about other companies making sure that what they say is private, stays private.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
no wonder the germans were dumb enough to get caught doing this...i mean, c'mon, they never caught onto the old radio transister in the coffee pot routine...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
They should have read that SP3 EULA more carefully.
"...GIVES US THE RIGHT TO BLOW ALL CURRENT AND FUTURE INVESTIGATIONS"
The software errors/stupidity that let the alleged criminals find out they were being tapped, or the fact that we don't have those errors here in the US. Not that I do anything wrong, but I'd still prefer not to be monitored by the government. This reminds me of a /. article a while back about the US taking bids for a central repository of personal information. It may sound like a great idea to the politicians, but after a while they're going to need money, and guess what?... Then everyone's personal information is up for sale. Telcos have been doing this for a while, even my university (UCF) does this, and I get a few dozen porn/marketing spams a day, just because they have my email address in their records.
And you thought spam was a problem now....
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
This would have never happened back in the good old days of Hitler!
Very funny. My grandfather died in Auschwitz.
He got drunk and fell out of his guard tower.
If it had happened in England the subject could have been, "Buggy Bugging Backfires On British Bobbies."
If it happened in Bavaria, we could say it backfired on Bavarian Bundespolizei..
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Most of the paswords are simple, such as "1-2-3-4-5"
That's the same combination I have on my luggage!
"You get what you pay for after all." --
"The technical fault arose when we were installing new software," a spokesman for the mobile phone company O2 said.
Don't you just have to sit and listen somewhere to tap mobile phones? You should be able to discretely listen to mobile phones(with the blessing of the teleco's) easily. The bug must have been somewhere in the overhead of logging thousands of calls.
Since the bug is probably in the overhead and not the actual tap itself, the teleco would probably be the party at fault.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb! - Dark Helmet
TODO: Something witty here...
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?
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!
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
The Gestapo'd be embarrassed by these lightweights....
... 'HoooGAAAAAANN!'
I bet Hogan is behind it all!
I can hear it now
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
How so? Even in the US it would be legal if the police had the proper warrants.
Best Slashdot Co
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
A couple of things seem rather odd to me, 1) Why do you need a voicemail to track callers (I do not profess to understand the underlying workings of cell-phone infrastructure). 2) They installed new software that cause the problem, but it really only showed up on the invoicing system? So did the install a new invoicing system? Sounds like they don't have their hacking all that together over there....but just my gut instinct. Maybe someone could shed some greater light on the subject...
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
-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.
The charge had been listed as a phone sex number, there wouldn't have been a problem.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I agree. I would rather have you die in an act of terrorism than to give up my civil liberties...
"Remember: Mohammed Atta and his crew of butchers, who murdered 3000 Americans on 9/11/01, plotted the entire scheme in Germany."
Where the hell are you getting this? One of Mohammed Atta's possible places of residnece was Hamburg, Germany. But so was florida. In fact, Florida was one for Waleed Alshehri, Wail Alshehri and Abdulaziz Alomari. Who *all* happened to be on AA #11 Boeing 767.
The police ARE trying to listen in on private phone calls, in the hopes of finding something there. Would you say police seaching private homes was OK simply because they're only looking for criminals? Not if you believe in any form of privacy.
"Al-Qaeda cells coordinating international terrorism is an everyday occurence in many German cities" -- you have direct knowledge of this? I haven't seen it reported anywhere. Maybe we suspect it is "an everyday occurrence" but suspicion without evidence is nothing, and acting on that to monitor 20,000 numbers would be harassment. Police doing "everything they can" would logically include what besides phone taps? Fighting terrorism is a worthy cause, but trashing everything we believe in to do it is not.
Give blame where blame is due, but nothing is gained by mindlessly rounding up the usual suspects. Al Queda is evil, and so is an authoritarian police state.
The problem was they were billing the "suspects" not the criminals in jail with phat bank accounts!
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
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?)
Perhaps this can be employed by your local librarian as well:
"Oh, that's a not a late fee, that's the 'records retrieval' charge... Gee, I'm sorry, that should have been billed to the FBI, let me take that off of your account. Now, do you still want me to fetch that Civil Engineering book on demolition explosives?"
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.
From Germans to everyone:
All your calls are belong to us.
Its funny how in Germany they seem to want to charge the customer were in the UK all the mobile teco's got pissed off with requests for duplicate bill's from the police (which have all call's made and when) that they started charging them.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
"Buggy Bugging By British Bobbies Backfires"
OK, one more...
If this happened in Amish country, it could read, "Buggy buggy bugging backfires in bucolic backwoods blunder".
I promise not to post for the rest of the day.
He's psychic! Or psycho? Well, socially challenged or "troll".
... and in England ... in that hotbed of insurrection, Florida ... and my neighbor's garage (oops, shouldn't've said that). Remember how they used public internet terminals in libraries to communicate godknowswhat? Communication is so easy now that location barely matters.
Seriously, a significant amount of 9/11 planning took place in Germany (Hamburg?)
Sure let the f-ing govt take away all our liberties, under the "I have nothing to hide" moniker. Well, you DO have something to hide, YOUR PRIVACY. They can sieze property w/o cause, tap your phone, spy on you, hell even get your library habits WITHOUT CAUSE. I'm sorry to say, but idiots like you who want security over freedom don't seem to understand that without freedom, who cares about security?
Now that the dumbass republicans control both houses, i'm sure we'll lose more of our rights, multinational corporations will gain a bigger foothold in world domination, and you will be arrested for "looking" at a cop wrong.
DONT SAY I DIDNT TELL YOU
(see that small camera in your bathroom?)
Maybe the German police would say something like:
"Das cellphones ist nicht usen fur trakken das badfolken. Das policen ist nicht snoopen das folken a la 3rd Reich. Relaxen und watchen das bills increasen. And Kwitchurbelliaken."
Zey have vays ov making you pay forr it!
RMN
~~~
Anyone who isn't white.
This is the same country that outlawed red blood in video games. Well, if the those violent video games and nazi symbols aren't getting through, how is there crime to even wiretap? *couch* sorry, choked on my own sarcasm.
Is /. English? If not then it wouldn't be illegal, but thanks for the tip anyhow.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
you mean Destroyee, don't you?
Even assuming the remaining 15% were all agents of the secret police, how could they keep up with everyone else? Each agent would have to tap, monitor and follow six people.
RMN
~~~
And those awful communist Bad Guys are gone and the Good Guys won. Everything's all better now.
Or even better:
Buggy Bugging by British Bobbies Backfires ?
Start the sentence with "Bugger!"
RMN
~~~
The US government/law enforcement/intelligence agencies would never use their powers to spy on people. Aren't you a PATRIOT?
-Puk
If they were charged, will they get a refund?
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!
I think it's someone who makes pottery.
Try saying that ten times fast!
Sounds to me like the Germans just sent the bill a bit early; they should have sent it after the investigation was complete.
1984 came late it seems...
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Or: Blatant Buggy Bugging Botched, Backfires: British Bobbies Buggered, Baffled. Boffins Blamed.
No, Slashdot isn't, but the British Broadcasting Corporation (aka The BBC) who's coverage of this story Slashdot has linked to is.
"Big Brother's Biggest Blunder: Bad buggy bugs beget big bill-related bungle. Backlash begins."
Why should they have rights? Why should people who want to destroy us, and take away our livihood, and remove our liberties have any right? I don't understand why anyone would want them to have rights. Let's support everything we can to stop them.
-BrentNur wenn man seine Nachbarn hasst.
Und wer nicht?
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Yes, indeed -- they were even charged for it.
Why should they have rights? Why should people who want to destroy us, and take away our livihood, and remove our liberties have any right? I don't understand why anyone would want them to have rights. Let's support everything we can to stop them.
Am I to presume that you can decide precisely whose rights are to be ignored, just by looking at them? In order for you to discern who should be tapped and who should not be tapped, you must first understand that probable cause is required in order to obtain a warrant.
So does that make the choice:
- tap us all or
- tap us at random or
- tap us because we're different,
instead of
- tap us upon the basis of a sworn affidavit showing probable cause?
When you can tell the difference between friend and foe on sight, let us all know. It will make this war far easier.
But that should not deter us from violating a "few" people's rights under the rule of necessity to impose peace and order under law martial rule, should it?
Until it is your rights that have been violated.
Or do you presume to sacrifice your essential liberty in exchange for some unattainable temporary safety?
In that case, you deserve neither liberty nor safety, and that is what you will get.
Feel free to mod me way, way down.
Liberty is not a concept... Liberty is a way of life!!!
Ummm how hypocritical is that?
Why should they have rights?
Everyone should have rights.
Why should people who want to destroy us, and take away our livihood, and remove our liberties have any right?
What the hell is wrong with you. You're like every other idiot in this country that thinks "Well G Dubbaya is taking away rights of certain people so that I can keep mine and live a happy life." It reminds me of something I read a while ago -
In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and still I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.
If you change communists to terrorists, jews to muslims, trade unionists to hackers, you basically have the situation of today.
Noce Troll, you got me. Good idea. If we take away thier right to a torture-free interrogation, we'll find that nearly 100% of the accused criminals confess to their crimes and we can execute them there in the interogation room.
There are reasons you can't take away any of someone's rights until they're convicted by a jury.
Oh, and it's a slippery slope. One day accused terrorists are held for just a month or two without being charged, a few years later they sodomize you until you confess to driving under the influence back in 1973, you dirty scum of a degenerate human you.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
That depends on the legality of the revolution. After the fiasco in Florida a couple of years ago, the Queen is reported to be seriously considering revoking the declaration of independence.
=o)
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
This idea of "protecting" and "defending" criminals who will then return the favour by doing all they can to destroy us is preposturous. That seems to be like saying that you should stop the government from finding and punishing the person who burglered your neighbors house. After all, if the government is willing to go after those who steal property, they'll surely go after those who own property next. In the meantime, Mr. I've-Protected-You-To-Protect-Me comes around to burgler your house.
No thanks, I'll have none of that scenerio. I'll use my liberties in this democracy to strongly defend not only those people who would take away my liberties, but also to keep a government that will protect my liberties using every possible measure available. And I think that based on the elections results yesterday that most Americans agree with me.
We live in a good situation here. I can't wait for these 2 strong years of further strengthing ourselves against those who are bent at our destruction.
-BrentSuch as just last month, when they gagged the press from reporting allegations that the UK govenment contracted Al Qaeda to assassinate Gaddafi.
Not only did they gag reporting the story, they also demanded that the media can't even report (or protest) the fact that they have been gagged!
Welcome to the free world. Leave your brains and integrity at the door please...
Ok whatever, live in a dream world where your liberties are protected by having them taken away by the government. I think based on the current president that most Americans are fucking retarded.
This idea of "protecting" and "defending" criminals who will then return the favour by doing all they can to destroy us is preposturous.
Actually I was talking about protecting and defending your rights and the rights of other people. You don't seem to understand what's going on in this country, do you realize how many people were arested in NYC the weeks following 9/11 just because they looked suspicious and held for very long amounts of time (the law saying that they couldn't hold you for more than 48 hours or whatever amount of time was lifted.) They were given no right to an attorney, no lawyers, no phone call, no trial. If I were arrested I could have been sent to jail for 3 weeks, not been told what I did, then released and not able to fight back. Terrorists didn't take away our rights or liberties, the government did.
I'll use my liberties in this democracy to strongly defend not only those people who would take away my liberties, but also to keep a government that will protect my liberties using every possible measure available.
You will use your liberties to defend people who would take away the liberties and also a government that will protect your liberties by every possible measure available (by taking them away)? Wow so basically you're giving up your liberties and the liberties of all other citizens just so terrorists can't take away your liberties? Umm wait who has the power to give and take liberties... THE GOVERNMENT. So let's defend the government the only being capable of taking away liberties to stop terrorists from taking away our liberties (which they can't do anyway... I hope this eventually sinks through, only the GOVERNMENT can take away liberties and they've been doing that for over a year now.)
Would you rather spend 3 weeks in jail cooperating with federal investigators, or worry about being blown up in the next building that Al-Quida is going to blow up? It's no contest for me, I'm taking the 3 weeks.
-BrentCo-operating with federal investigators? Do you think they did that in jail? No it was more like
Police: get in jail
You: Why?
Police: We said, GET IN JAIL!
You: I said WHY!
Police: Looks like we've got a trouble maker
*police throw you into jail*
You: Don't I get one phone call? Can't I speak to an attorney?
Police: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH BWAHAHAHAHAHA did you hear that george, he wants a phone call!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
3 weeks later
Police: Well you can get out now
You: What did I do? I'm going to sue the crap out of this police department!
Police: HAHAHAHA SUE US!?!?! Good luck buddy but thanks to new laws we were legally allowed to detain you for nothing more than being suspicious.
You: Well I'm going to get someone to believe me and we'll fight back.
This is where people like you come in...
You: Help! Help! I'm being repressed! Other People: Whatever, that's what you get for being a terrorist ok.
You: A terrorist?!?! WHAT! I didn't do anything!!!
Other People: Sure you didn't, look at you, you're from palestine, you had to do SOMETHING!
Remind you of anything? Like the japanese during WW2 right after Pearl Harbor? Oh sure it's ok lock up all the Japanese, as long as they can't blow up any more of the armies bases we'll be fine, who cares if they'll be hated for the next few years and unable to get jobs after being arrested for absolutely no reason. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
And Kwitchurbelliaken.
:-)
I understood the joke in every fake german word, but what you mean with "And Kwitchurbelliaken." I really couldn't figure out.
Could you get closer to real german spelling or give a translation of what's that suposed to mean?
Thanks.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Well, Bundespolizei means Federal Police, so it wouldn't make sense to put a state together with it.
I don't speak German, I just got Bundes from Bundespost and Bundesliga. But how about "Buggy bugging backfires on battalion of burly blond Bundespolizei battling baddies based in Bavaria"?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I'll be fine. I'm not a Catholic or a Protestant. I'm a Jedi!
I am not the terrorist you seek.
*waves hand*