If you have ever hooked up another phone in your house, technically, you have tapped your own phone line.
With the phone-tapping scandal taking centre stage in Parliament, a thought may have crossed your mind: “Is my phone being tapped?”
It’s illegal (the government, though, can do it for national security reasons) but very easy to tap a landline.
Here’s how. Your phone line has two copper wires — one with a green covering and the other with a red one. The green wire connects to the positive end and the red cord connects to the negative end to form a circuit. The wires transmit sound waves (your voice) as an electrical current, which a phone company sends through wires that are connected to the phone’s speaker and microphone.
It’s easy to add a new load to the circuit board along this path. In fact, if you have ever hooked up another phone in your house, technically, you have tapped your own phone line. This method, however, is too primitive in today’s techie world. Eavesdroppers have, hence, devised sophisticated ways to tap phones.
Some use a bug that could have tiny microphones that pick up sound waves directly. The sound runs to a radio transmitter, which transmits a signal that varies with the current. Those spying on you could set up a nearby radio receiver that picks up this signal and sends it to a speaker or encodes it on a tape.
There are many types of bugs. There could be an ‘Acoustic Bug’ that can even be placed in a water glass, or soft spots around windows, structural defects, ventilation structures, poorly-installed power outlets — any area from where sound can leak. An ultrasonic or VLF Bug is a technique used to convert the sound into an audio signal above the range of human hearing. An RF (or Radio Frequency) Bug is the most well-known type of bugging device wherein a radio transmitter is placed in an area or in a device. An Optical Bug converts sound (or data) into an optical pulse or a beam of light. It is rarely used, expensive, but easy to detect. A good example of this would be an active or a passive laser listening device.
Bugs would need a sweep for detection since all the complicated recording equipment can be kept concealed and away from phone lines. But the radio receiver has to be within range of the transmitter — for instance, in a van parked outside a home as spotted in many spy movies.
Companies also sell spy software like the ‘Ultimate bluetooth mobile phone spy 2010’ with which you can eavesdrop on anyone’s calls, or even read SMSes.
The software costs anywhere between Rs 3,500 and Rs 7,000 and can be downloaded from the internet. You even have listening devices like the ‘Bionic Ear With Booster’ that can magnify faint or distant sounds, or the ‘Detect Ear Parabolic Microphone System’ that claims to hear conversations with pinpoint accuracy at 300 yards.
On the internet, data packets (voice over internet protocol or VoIP phones like Skype or Gchat) can be intercepted by the government using packet sniffers, such as the FBI’s Carnivore system (now abandoned). It was implemented during the Clinton administration with the approval of the Attorney General but now replaced with improved commercial software such as NarusInsight that is a supercomputer allegedly used by the NSA and other bodies to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of citizens’ and corporations’ internet communications in realtime. Its installation in AT&T’s San Francisco internet backbone gave rise to a 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Mobile phones, too, are easy to trace. It will get easier as third-generation (3G) phones are introduced, since the base stations will be located closer together. For mobile phones, the major threat is collection of communications data that not only include information about the time, duration, originator and recipient of the call, but also the identification of the base station where the call was made from (approximate geographical location). It is also possible to get greater resolution of a phone’s location by combining information from a number of cells surrounding the location, which cells routinely communicate (to agree on the next handoff — for a moving phone). Governments can easily tap mobile phones with the cooperation of the phone company.
| TELL-TALE SIGNS OF TAPPING |
| * If you have noticed strange sounds or volume changes on your phone |
| * If you have noticed static, popping, or scratching on your phone lines |
| * Sounds come from your phone’s handset even when it’s hung up |
| * Your AM/FM radio (most cellphones have it today) develops strange interference |
| * Your car radio senses interference |
| * TV reception gets weird |
| * Telephone, cable or plumbing repair people show up to do work near your place even though no one called them |
| * You see an unattended van outside your home |
Plugging taps
However, you need not fret. There are ways to counter phone-tapping threats. A high-tech ‘Frequency Finder Bug Detector’, for instance, can detect phone taps, hidden cameras, eavesdropping devices or bugs, GPS trackers, cellphone bugs and room bugs. An RF ‘Telephone Analyser’ can alert you in an instant if there is a wiretap on your telephone line, if eavesdropping is happening while you are speaking and also continually sweeps your room for RF bugs. It can alert you even if you are on the phone. Consider this. A computer-controlled unit, from Brickhouse Security, continuously sweeps your telephone and phone lines for any eavesdropping, and your room for RF bugs (detection frequency is wide and fear reaching from 70Mhz to 2Ghz).
A ‘Vibrating Transmitter Detector’ instantly alerts you when a transmitter is detected and gives you two silent forms of notification — silent vibration and visual blinking light emitting device (LED) light. With the device hidden in your pocket, you can covertly monitor eavesdropping activity without alerting anyone that you are sweeping the premises for concealed bugs.
Data encryption technologies, too, are helping to curtail unauthorised phone-tapping to some degree, but as encryption capabilities expand, so do wiretapping techniques. Being aware can be of immense help.
