So, how do you know if your phone has been tapped? With
digital telecomm switching, phone tapping is not something
people do on a street corner. The "bonus services" like caller ID,
conference calling, and call forwarding implement all the
raw technical capabilities required for telephone tapping. The
CALEA act required telephone companies to incorporate telephone
tapping into the computer programs which run the network. The
number of people, in the telephone companies, outside of the
NSA, who have "need to know" for massive telephone
tapping is approximately on the same order as the
number of Air Force and Navy officers who have "need
to know" for nuclear weapons launch codes. I know
enough about telecommunications engineering to know how little I
know. It's not my engineering specialty. Most of the HNN
conservatives have never programmed a computer in their lives, and
they think they know all there is to know!!! They know nothing and
they think they know everything. I used to have conversations with
la-di-da, too-good-for-this-world, academic Marxists who were like
that. It's a strange reversal. I don't know whether it's simply a
matter of the Trotskyite roots of Neo-Conservatism, or whether
it's just a matter of critical technological lag.
You have no way of knowing if your telephone is being
tapped. What you can do is to assume that your telephone has been
tapped, and automatically take such actions as you would consider
justified in that eventuality. There are various technical
measures you can take, such as encryption.
In 1774-75, in response to events, large numbers
of villages in New England organized "Committees of
Correspondence and Defense." Something similar seems
to be happening among the computer people on the
internet.
[Responding to Bill Heuisler's claim
that (1/4/2006) message traffic could be easily intercepted
and anlyzed, I replied:]
Well, matters have
rather changed over the last forty years or so.
Physical Plant:
In the first place, there's much more optical fiber in place
nowadays. The telecommunications glut of the 1990's means that
people are practically giving bandwidth away. Fiber optic cables
are preferable to satellite links because their time
lag is less. It is something like 20,000 mile up to a
geostationary satellite, and 20,000 miles down again. That is,
about a fifth of a second at the speed of light. I know that
doesn't sound like much, but it does play the devil with machine
feedback, and you have to design special mechanisms to get
around it. By contrast, an optical cable to Europe
is only about three or four thousand miles long, and even
allowing for the diminished speed of light in glass, the
time lag might be about one sixth of that in a
satellite link. The better grade of optical fibers, used
in long-distance telecommunications, are usually "graded index
single-mode." To tap in, you would have to cut the cable,
and this would cause alarms to ring in the telecommunications
company's switching center. The whole point of the CALEA
act was that the FBI was becoming afraid because it was losing
its traditional wiretapping ability due to technological
changes.
Additionally, packet switching is in widespread use. Packet
switching tends to convert messages into waves of packets, each
traveling independently along the momentarily least congested
route. Telephone tapping in a packet regime practically requires
that packets be steered to a point where they can be picked
up.
Sattelites and radio generally are primarily useful for
communication with mobile units. The tendency is to incorporate
enough cryptography to give at least as good privacy as a
landline, because any kid can use generic components to build a
receiver tunable to any frequency.
Encryption:
The gold standard of encryption is the so-called
"once-only-cipher." You take a stream of true random numbers,
produced by an electronic "noise generator," XOR them against
the plaintext to get the ciphertext, and XOR them against
the ciphertext to get the plaintext back. And you
never use the key again, which is why the cipher is called
"once-only." You can put something like 4.7
gigabytes (4700 books) of once-only-key on a DVD for about
a dollar, so the difficulties of once-only ciphers are not what
they once were. Once-only-ciphers are theoretically
unbreakable-- that is, there is no logical or even statistical
basis for asserting that one putative plaintext is the correct
solution of a given ciphertext of the same (padded)
length.
If you know someone to the point of conspiring with
him, the only sane thing to do is to exchange DVD's, and go to
once-only cipher in the interests of peace-of-mind. One
can take for granted that all the more critical communications
of the Pentagon are on this basis. Lesser ciphers are
useful for dealing with people you don't know well enough to set
up a special arrangement with. And of course, people you
don't know very well are precisely the people you can't trust
not to publish messages sent to them.
Now, for ordinary encryption:
There is something called Bremmerman's Conjecture, an
argument from quantum physics about the ultimate limits
of how fast a computer can ultimately go. The consensus is
that a "complexity" much in excesss of ten to the three
hundredth power is beyond the limits of any computer which
can be built. The computational difficulty of cracking a
cipher increases much faster than the computational difficulty
of encrypting and decrypting. A typical desktop computer, which
would have been worth perhaps a hundred million dollars in 1975,
can shove a message into Bremmerman's Conjecture territory
without undue difficulty.
Now, of course there is this buzz going around about "quantum
computing," which is hard to assess. However, it is agreed that
there are certain operations which quantum computers cannot
perform. Private key ciphers are designed to methodically use
just about every possible operation. They are designed rather
like the thicket in which Brer Rabbit was born and
bred. Furthermore, they use "autocoding," an operation
analogous to carrying in addition, so they can only be
attacked at the start of the message-- after that,
the autocoding gives the cipher the properties of a
once-only-cipher.
Public-key ciphers, at present, are not thicket designed.
They _may_ be vulnerable to quantum computing, and they seem
exposed to advances in mathematics. It is presently unclear
whether one can design a public-key cipher on the thicket
principle. A partial solution to the weaknesses of public-key
ciphers is the so-called "keyserver," eg. Kerberos. You
have an ongoing relationship with the party operating the
keyserver, and they give you "cryptographic introductions" to
people you want to talk to. That is, you use your
private-key cipher to communicate with the keyserver, and the
other party uses his private-key cipher to communicate with the
keyserver, and the keyserver generates a random number and
gives it to both of you to use as a private key in
communicating directly.
The main ultimate practical usefulness of public-key ciphers is
not for secrecy as such, but for digital signatures. Someone can
have enough information able a public-key cipher to determine
that a signature is good, without being able to forge it. So the
real threat of quantum computing is primarily towards signatures
and electronic payments.
Incidentally, with the rise of "bot-nets," the NSA is no
longer top dog in code cracking. The author of a computer virus
can steal computer time worldwide faster than the NSA can
buy computers. Basically, everyone in the
telecommunications business knows that they have to take certain
cryptographic measures, or the Russian mafia will own all
their subscribers' credit card numbers, simply by tapping
the phones of the major mail-order firms. A
practical side effect of this is that if the NSA wants in, it
cannot simply tap lines, but has to physically get
into the telecommunications company's control room, and
practically, that means inducing the telecommunications company
to cooperate.
Now, of course, if you don't trust the telephone company, you
can superimpose your own cryptography. That is what people
are discussing doing. Telephone tapping is ultimately
futile, in much the same sense that the British
march to Lexington and Concord was futile. It merely broke down
trust, and caused people to start acting in terms of the logic
of force. One can say with the benefit of hindsight
that General Gage was probably a rather stupid man who did
not understand what America was all about. The logic of force
meant that within a couple of days, he was besieged in Boston by
15,000 minutemen, twice the total number of British troops
in North America. The logic of force as applied to
telecommunications means that every little girl burns a
disk full of random numbers, and exchanges same with her
best friend, so that they can giggle over the phone in
perfect privacy.
[order of material shifted for clarity]
Let's finish off my field first. Fiber optic cables do not cease
at the water's edge. Another basic point you have to
understand is this: the information capacity of an
electromagnetic wave-- that is radio, microwave, or light,
is proportional to its frequency. Satellite radio is
broadly speaking in the gigaherz range, that is,
billions of cycles per second. The signal has to drill up
through twenty miles of atmosphere before reaching space,
so you can't go too far up-frequency before it starts behaving
like a weather radar. Weather radars are very nice in
their place, but for long-distance communication, they present
certain problems... By contrast, an optical cable runs on
light in the hundred teraherz range.An optical cable will
typically have ten or so optical fibers. In other words,
an optical cable can carry as much information as a
thousand or more communications satellites. As
you may infer, the relation between an optical cable and a
satellite is very much that between a truck and a mule. Undersea
cables were built to all kinds of improbable places. In
particular, Global Crossing built a long way out
into the Third World.
http://www.cellular.co.za/news_1999/news-06071999-africa_one_plans.htm
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2002/08/09_mpp.html
http://www.globalcrossing.com/xml/news/2002/january/11.xml
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=51872
http://www.globalcrossing.com/xml/network/net_map.xml
http://home.singtel.com/about_singtel/network_n_infrastructure/submarine_cable_systems/networkinfra_submarinecablesystems.asp
http://www.convergedigest.com/DWDM/dwdmarticle.asp?ID=16871&ctgy=
If you want to get somewhere which is only
mule-accessible, what you do is to drive your truck, pulling
your horse trailer to the road access point which is closest to
where you want to get to. I think the same principle applies to
cables and satellites. Even it the cable doesn't go all
the way, you might want to get within the footprint of a
comparatively underutilized satellite, perhaps over
the Indian Ocean, and avoid competing with mobile services
and satellite broadcasting in the comparatively congested
and expensive North Atlantic region.
---------------------
Parenthetically, computer voice recognition does not work very
well. As one Slashdot humorist remarked: "Voice recognition is
AI complete." Unless a surveillance agency knows exactly what it
is looking for, it has to record a large swath of
telephone conversations, file them away, and eventually
accumulate enough so that the telephone numbers which are called
form a pattern. They need to know that little Jenny is little
Brenda's best friend, simply for purposes of filtration.
You see the potential invasiveness.
You might review the Brandon Mayfield case, incidentally. It's a
classic case of that general sort of thing going haywire. The
FBI issued an apology, but the apology was not accepted, and the
last I heard, Mayfield was suing them. His "theory" will be in
effect that the FBI intentionally attempted to isolate
militants by interfering with their marital relations, and that
he got picked up on account of his work as a divorce
lawyer. The truth is probably more subtle. Artificial
Intelligence programs are like badly behaved dogs. They tend to
surface and act on their owners' suppressed feelings and
motivations. You don't like someone, but you know you are
not allowed to bite him. Your dog knows that you do
not like the person, but cannot understand why biting is not
permissible. So he bites the person for no better reason
than that you dislike him.