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Does Wiretapping Require Cell Company Cooperation?
decora writes "Recently the dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, accidentally admitted to wiretapping journalist Irina Khalip. Khalip is the wife of Andrei Sannikov, one of the many opposition presidential candidates who was imprisoned after the election in 2010. I am wondering how Lukashenko did this? Can a government tap a modern cellphone system without the company knowing? Or would it require cooperation, like when AT&T and others helped the NSA perform warrantless wiretapping on Americans?"
If the government took the time to build a mainframe to crack the encryption keys, theoretically they could do it with little more than a partyvan equipped with a few dozen microwave radios or cell phones.
And isn't it the case now that stuff is embedded in all the major telecom hardware makers?
Dog is my co-pilot.
Just think about it for a minute. The only way a government or dictator could tap someone's phone without the phone company knowing would involve using secret agents (in the broadest sense) to plant bugs or intercept signals.
If there were ways to tap phones without doing this, using only the phone system, they would be common knowledge.
The easiest method is to use your influence (legitimate or otherwise) to get the phone company to cooperate, which is unsurprisingly the most common.
What was the point of this question?
I think the key word here is "dictator", as in you WILL do this wiretap....
Although it is a bit more difficult with current technology cell phones can be intercepted. The portable phones, even claiming to be frequency shifting can also be intercepted. And nothing is a worse bug than a baby monitor as those things have quite a signal output and are almost never secured. They can broadcast whispers from many rooms in the home as the sensitivity is great on their microphones. I think any serious radio hobbyist could talk if they were not frightened to admit eavesdropping. From what I know people should be encouraged to tap into communication streams. What you learn might scare you to death.
I am certain that none of the above remarks are factual and only some part of a bit of stew gone rancid or a fire in my imagination. I know nothing.
My opinion is if you aren't doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about. If it helps put criminals and terrorists away....have at it!!!
Cinthia :)
http://www.car-shipping-quotes.net/site_map.html
if you have the money and contacts. Covered on slashdot as far back as 2003 at least ...
Basically GSM can be made to switch to A5/0 i.e. disable encryption by use of a commercially available "IMSI catcher" device. Originally these sent a spoofed degraded signal to the base station to make it think A5/0 was needed (it uses less bandwidth), these days it seems they just act as base stations. Cellphones automatically lock onto the strongest base station, and GSM security authenticates the handset only, so such rogue base stations are not technically difficult to make.
The "degraded signal" method implies that A5/0 also kicks in naturally in areas of bad reception and anyone with appropriate scanner hardware could monitor calls in that area. You'd still have to deal with the frequency hopping though.
A government can bribe or persuade an employee to perform the tap, or place an undercover worker in the telephone company in a position which can perform taps. So taps could be done without the telephone organization knowing about them.
GSM has horrible security and carriers aren't exactly doing their best to make their networks secure either. A while ago you needed relatively expensive equipment (around $1000-2000) to be able to sniff on the network, but it's now been done with a few very cheap phones. There's a very informative presentation (with video) here. For this to work, you need to be close to the person you want to eavesdrop on however.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/intercepting-cell-phone-calls/
does that answer your summary?
GSM is not the most secure standard out there. Check the video from this presentation for a nice overview of exactly how fucked up GSM security is.
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/events/3654.en.html
It's very easy to tap a phone. Landlines are extremely simple to tap. You could do it with a little research on the web. Tapping a cellphone is slightly more complicated but still easy. In more modern countries it's getting a little more difficult as we all move towards soft-switches but in Belarus they still have PULSE dialing on their landlines. This means their switches are definitely hardware, and definitely at least 30-40 years old. Who owned the phone company 30-40 years ago? The USSR. I guarantee all their cellphone traffic travels through the same switch(s) installed by the USSR back in the day and all the equipment the KGB had installed at the time is likely still there. You make a call, it hits the cell tower, the cell tower has trunks that lead back to the switch and now they have you. It's a trivial matter to request that all incoming calls from a particular number get recorded.
Ever since the world ended up going hell bent on terrorism laws (New World Order), all wire-tapping is legal with or without a warrant and you do not require any special permissions anymore if you work in law enforcement and a telecoms company need not know either.
It is better known as black boxing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box these systems have been in place since 1998 legally. The FBI changed it's code name from Carnivore to Magic Lantern after a bunch of hackers exposed the source code "cult of the dead cow" If I remember correctly.
Now you also have the likes of GCHQ and deep packet inspection http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/05/gchq_mti_statement and they have been doing this since 1996.
The simple fact is you can be recorded for any half plausible excuse. Getting your location through a cell network takes about 5 seconds...... sadly each persons privacy is eroded and you do not have any choice.
Don't use Credit Cards, Cell Phones, Loyality Cards or the internet. Get out more and a pen and paper works better than spoken words!
All cows eat grass!
If you have a gluttonous lust for ghastly, utterly banal, PR-drivelspeak concerning wiretapping, anybody on Cisco's "Lawful Intercept Mediation Device Suppliers" list is excellent reading.
Reminds me of the Greek wiretapping scandal. In that version of the wiretapping scandal, a very technically sophisticated attacker (possibly an insider in the phone company) installed wiretap software into the phone network's routers. News broke after a top exec at the phone company hanged himself. Though surely there's a lot we don't know, it was almost certainly not official company policy to cooperate with government wiretaps on political opposition.
Not only is cooperation from the phone company not required, but the phone company doesn't get to know when it's being used, and has no technical means to stop it or prevent it.
It's a legal requirement that the government is given the means to tap at will, and a legal requirement that their tapping cannot be discovered.
That's what is happening when telecom/network equipment vendors are touting the "lawful intercept" feature compliance of their latest product models.
Wiretapping is just too easy now. It used to be quite difficult. Before electronic central offices, wiretapping required either a tap near the phone end of the circuit, or wiring to the appropriate circuit at the central office's main distributing frame. Telcos charged law enforcement for central office taps. Guliani writes, in his book about his days prosecuting the New York Mafia, that they were paying about a million dollars a year to New York Telephone for wiretaps, which were charged as private line extensions. On one occasion, the FBI didn't pay a bill on time, and the billing system billed the other party on the circuit, the one being wiretapped. This was a major motivation for CALEA.
In the crossbar era, it was possible to use the Automatic Line Insulation Test (ALIT) gear for wiretapping. This was a system that automatically tested each line every night, applying a test voltage and measuring leakage between the lines and to ground. Lines could also be tested remotely, on request, and the gear allowed listening in. But a central office would typically only have two sets of ALIT gear (three racks each), and using it for wiretapping interfered with routine maintenance. The FBI could sometimes get access to ALIT gear, but not local law enforcement. Only for short periods, too; the telco would keep demanding their test gear back.
All this was such a headache that wiretaps weren't used much. Now, all CO gear has remote wiretapping of large numbers of lines on demand at all times. It's also much easier to record and to monitor the recordings. Orwell would be so impressed.
Why bother spying, i mean in the end whats the worst that can happen, you loose elections, and you still have billions of dollars. big deal.
Are they really that psychotically married to the idea of rule over the people?
I mean, get over it dumbass dictators, your a bunch of fukwits. That will get early dimmensure or some disease. You can take your billions when you died, might as well retire and live like Billy Maddison with all the cocaine you want.
Their rule over the people is one big illusion, 10million yes men, who would kill you for youre wealth if offered.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
IAX encryption
As of asterisk version 1.2.4 (maybe before) there is a rather undocumented channel encryption feature included in chan_iax2. After successful authentication the whole channel including control data and voice data is encrypted with AES128. The encryption can be activated by adding the line
encryption=aes128
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.