As we ease into an era of Internet telephony, is it getting easier to wiretap a phone? Frankly, it seems like it just couldn’t get any easier. That’s the lesson that comes out of a star-studded, revelation-filled court case in Los Angeles.
It’s the trial of Anthony Pellicano and four other defendants, accused of 79 counts of wiretapping, and it included enough Hollywood names to start a new studio. Among them: Silvester Stallone; the comedians Garry Shandling and Kevin Nealon; superagent Michael Ovitz; TV executive Brad Grey; John McTiernan, director of the Die Hard movies; and Michael Nathanson, one-time head of MGM.
But it’s the sordid technology-related details of the trial that interest David Halbfinger, as he details in an article in today’s New York Times.
Wiretapping is really, really easy. And not just for the government. Anyone sitting in on the Pellicano trial (and staying awake during the telecom testimony) could walk away ready to intercept phone calls after a quick stop at RadioShack for less than $50 in equipment.
Instead of bugging phones the old-fashioned way, Pellicano and his operatives broke into those metalic green-gray neighborhood phone boxes you see on streetcorners, and sometimes into telephone company central offices themselves. They essentially made conference calls out of the conversations of the people they were wiretapping, and recorded their end of the calls "on Macintosh computers."
It all sounds a bit like the wiretapping done in Greece during the 2004 Athens Olympics. That too was a star-studded scandal, though instead of actors and agents the dramatis personæ were politicians at the highest levels of government. There were some other differences. For one thing, the Athens affair was of cellphones, while cellular lines were just what Pellicano wasn’t able to tap into. And the Athens telephonic break-in was a masterful hack, while it hardly took more than a pair of alligator clips and a smooth voice to do what Pellicano and company did.
Every phone company service technician is given copies of two keys that can open nearly all of Southern California’s b-boxes, and retired technicians apparently keep them. Many boxes are not locked at all. Central offices, which can be entered by technicians at all hours, are also often unsupervised.
Prosecutors say a field technician from SBC Communications (now AT&T), Rayford Turner, who was a bit of a ladies’ man, prevailed upon a small group of middle-age female SBC dispatchers to give him whatever data he requested: toll records, cable pairs, names, phone numbers and so on. They continued to do so long after he retired.
Wiretapping gets easier and easier from the government’s point of view as well. In compliance with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, the phone companies opened up their networks to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Additional switches at telephone company central offices allow wiretaps to be conducted electronically, without cumbersome and time-consuming visits to telephone company equipment facilities. Oddly enough, Pellicano had much the same access to one key central office:
But when the phone to be tapped was near Mr. Pellicano’s offices — say, on Rodeo Drive — the detection became easier. Prosecutors say a special set of undocumented phone lines ran directly from the mainframe of the phone company’s Beverly Hills central office to a phone closet across the hall from the entrance to Mr. Pellicano’s offices and then to a bank of computers in a locked “war room” inside. These lines allowed Mr. Pellicano to monitor calls across Beverly Hills without even stepping outside.
The lesson from all this is that the telephone system is pretty porous. Law enforcement, intelligence agencies, phone company executives, and even retired technicians—as well as private detectives, of course—can monitor and record your phone conversations at will.
Ironically, although CALEA now covers Internet-based telephony, one way to protect the privacy of calls is to use Skype, which automatically encrypts the digital voice stream. As was widely reported at the time, German authorities failed to crack the encryption last year, though they have, apparently, not given up.
