Slashdot Mirror
Greek, U.S. Officials Tapped For Years
Bruce Schneier posts on a story being reported in the Seattle Intelligencer. Greek and U.S. officials in Greece apparently had their phones tapped for over a year before the 2004 Olympics. From the article: "It was not known who was responsible for the taps, which numbered about 100 and included Greek Prime Minister Costas Caramanlis and his wife, and the ministers of foreign affairs, defense, public order and justice. Most of Greece's top military and police officers were also targeted, as were foreign ministry officials and a U.S. embassy number. Also tapped were some journalists and human rights activists." Schneier gives a bit of technical background on how the tapping was accomplished.
No need to get all so "conspiracy FUD" about the phone companies loading code onto your phone. From the first article it says that "spyware" was loaded onto the central Vodafone server. Which is obviously the best place to attack the system. That way you can use the entire network as your spy infrastructure.
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For the curious, here's a list of how each of the fifty U.S. states handle tape recording of telephone calls.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
From official Greek sources, actually all high ranked officials have end-to-end encryption enabled handsets. The problem is that many officials admitted that many times they do not use this feature because of the inconvenience, since both parties have to have them enabled. The same way we do not always enable gaim encyption even though we and I our geek friends went through the trouble to set it up once.