Wanna bet your phone is tapped?

That is ridiculous. I work for a telco and i can assure you that phone taps are not only rarely used, but just arent very useful.

For one a phone tap requires a physical connection from a central office(where the dialtone origionates and is distributed) to a secure location that is owned by the police as the actual tapping cannot legally be done inside the telco office. This method of connection requires a technician to connect a jumper in the frame to a seperate cable run to a different location. The amount of capacitance this would add to the line would completely destroy any DSL signal thus causing the tapped individual to either have slow or no internet service. SO i think its safe to assume everyones DSL is working properly right?

Also you have the problem of thousands of telco techs nationwide connecting tens of thousands of taps to a known police owned cable in the central frame room on a daily basis. Telephone companies DO NOT even come close to having this kind of manpower at their disposal. Not to mention keeping that many technicians quiet abhout the disgusting amount of taps they are forced to run every single day. And trust me we wouldnt.

To moniter that many calls a day would require tens of thousands of individuals or a computer system so eleborate that it would require huge amounts of bandwwidth not possible with our current levels of technology.

The other problem with this is: how many times do you tthink the words terrorist, bomb, explosion, attack america, bin laden, alqueda, and so on were said over the phone in the days following 911?

The fact is phone taps are rarely used and 9 times out of 10 cant be used in court because of how it was obtained. It is mostly used to record mob men and biker gangs.

It would make more sense to use the internet to track data and people as everything is logged like IP addresses and whatnot. On the phone there is no way to prove that the voice you hearis the person they say they are.

reply to post by metaldemon2000


You are lying.

I know my phone is tapped. I stopped caring a long time ago. One thing that bothers me, though, is the wasting of intelligence resources and money listening to redundant two minute conversations about going over to a friends place. Is that really necessary? The time and money spent assinging surveillance agents to those menial tasks would be far better placed cracking down on organized criminals smuggling and selling illicit drugs, for example.

[edit on 14-7-2008 by Lucidliving]

If my phone were tapped, I would've been arrested a long time ago..

Not for anything terrrorist related, just petty stuff .. but, they'd also hear the people I talk to on the other end, and THEY would be sitting in a prison right now for some of the crap they may be involved in when I speak to them. It's just a couple of bad apples in the bunch of ppl I know but still ..

To put it blunt, The &%#$'s wide open man ..

reply to post by TruthTellist


THink what you want. I have worked for a telco for almost 4 years now. I seen how the systems in the central offices work and i know what is required to provide telephone plant to locations outside the CO for purposes of tapping lines.

Where i am from we have a police building located behind one of our main central offices where there certainly is cable going to that could be used to tap lines but it hasnt been used for that purpose since the 1980s.

Tell me, what makes you believe that the lines are tapped? Do you have the means of finding out? I do and i can tell you that it isnt.

I think people may be missing a point here.

Many tend to think of phone taps as a deliberately executed 'action' taken by an authority to secure and review the contents of phone calls. This is what law enforcement agencies had been doing for decades when investigating crimes, where the authorization comes from a judge, duly briefed, and officially agreeing that the invasion of privacy was warranted under the circumstances (hence the word 'warrant').

The 'phone tap' the federal government exercising is much different. All phone data is streamed through a collection point and is monitored. Each packet of the now digital data is filtered by hardware. The computers translate voice into words for grammatical and lexicological content. Key phrases and words alert the system to pass that stream through a more rigorous processing algorithm for more detailed review, leading up to review by a human being as more and more criteria are met qualifying it as worthy or the expenditure of such resources. There are 'targeted' communications as well, once the government has 'persons of interest' in their sights.

But this is no 'tap' as the old-timers knew them. This is a constant filtration process, which only became possible once the digital phone system was crammed down the industries throat. They could still have carried this our in the analog days, but it would have been a much more specialized effort, requiring a technology that is not in place today.

As to whether you're being tapped. You are. We all are. Every packet of digital information passed between two parties within our telecommunication infrastructure is subject to this 'bypass' or 'oversight.' Bar none (well maybe some 'special' people are protected, but we can guess as to who they might be.)


[edit on 14-7-2008 by Maxmars]

[edit on 14-7-2008 by Maxmars]

I wonder how many people on this forum are being listened to? I think we probably are, since we discuss conspiracies, etc. If someone is listening to me, I know they are bored out of their minds, lol! It would be a total waste of time and resources to listen to my psycho-babble, lol!

Originally posted by metaldemon2000
reply to post by TruthTellist

 

THink what you want. I have worked for a telco for almost 4 years now.

Unless you work for the NSA with at least level 3 clearance, your experience at Telco with commercial technology won't give you a good indication of how it's done on a secret level by the government.

[edit on 14-7-2008 by Lucidliving]

I was a switch engineer for a telecom company....just left the company a month ago. I can tell you now that no...all your phones are not tapped.

of Course don't be silly there isn't any warrant less wiretapping going on! Our government would Never spy on us citizens! We do have the right of privacy after all!



Our right of privacy was guaranteed by the constitution up until the patriot act anyway!

[edit on 14-7-2008 by LDragonFire]

Originally posted by LDragonFire
reply to post by TruthTellist

 

You think anywhere in the western world is as free as we once where? We're all losing our freedom/liberty based way of life to a police/security corporate state, the UK, Australia the rest of Europe are included here.

It seemed like we needed the big red menace [USSR] a Real potential enemy to keep our freedoms because today we are losing our freedoms to a host of imaginary enemies, or enemies that do Not have the ability to annihilate us!!

You know what? I'm starting to believe that there never was any freedom at all. Our phones have probably been tapped since there were phones to be tapped. The computers. Well duh, everyone knows those are monitored 24/7.

Nah, nothing's changed. They just don't have to pretend as much anymore. lol

reply to post by metaldemon2000


No kidding man, the lines are not tapped. EVERY call is recorded, and stored for future reference. There is no need to tap a single line, because again, everything is recorded.

with cell phones.. who needs a tap.. you can listen in on any phone you want.. with the right equipment

I doubt that my phones are tapped, being out of the U.S. Still, it's a possibility, and I thank Dragon for bringing up the possibility for discussion.

This is what I know: If any computer system is analyzing my conversations, it must be bored to tears.

Do computers ever commit suicide? ha! Perhaps another thread......

Originally posted by many ATS members
EVERY call is recorded, and stored for future reference.

Okay okay, but does anyone have any definitive PROOF of this? Other than inductive reasoning and circumstantial (albeit compelling) evidence?

reply to post by Ian McLean

As for the USA it's not a easy question to outright answer, but I did find this lil tidbit here:

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), passed in 1994, has powered its way back onto the front page this summer, and if you 1) live in the US and 2) pay taxes, you might soon be paying to implement it. And if you're a drug-dealing mobster, you might soon be experiencing it.

The FBI wants the ability to tap VoIP calls. To do this, the agency also wants access to all of your network traffic—and it looks like it's on the way to getting it. Following a long set of legal battles, the US Court of Appeals in June upheld 2-1 a newer and broader definition of CALEA's scope that could affect every university and library in the country.
Big brother wants a window into VoIP at any cost

And this, now it's interesting to me how they knew when and who the 9/11 hijackers where using there phones.

George W. Bush’s warrantless phone data collection may not only violate the U.S. Constitution but expend so much money and manpower that America is made less safe – by diverting resources away from more practical steps, like inspecting cargo and hiring translators.

Yet, because the operation is wrapped in layers and layers of secrecy – based on the dubious argument that al-Qaeda might not realize it’s being spied on – the public doesn’t know how much the project costs, who’s getting contracts and whether it does any good.
Bush's 'Big Brother' Blunder

Now it's a much more open program for our brothers and sisters in the UK:

May 20, 2008 (IDG News Service) Civil liberties groups in the U.K. are up in arms about a possible move by the national government to set up a central database that could be used to keep track of phone calls, e-mail messages and Web site visits for antiterrorism purposes.

The U.K. government is preparing new telecommunications legislation that it says is necessary to deal with changes in the way people communicate, including the use of e-mail, instant messaging, blogs and social networking sites. Under existing laws, the growing use of such technologies "will increasingly undermine our current capabilities to obtain communications data and use it to protect the public," said a spokeswoman for the U.K. Home Office.
U.K. government eyes database for storing info on electronic communications

And another article:

Home Office officials are working on a system that could track every phone call and email sent in the UK and store the records in a government database.

MPs are to consider the scheme with the aim of including the proposals in the impending Communications Bill. If that happens, the snooping technology could become law later this year.

The Home Office insisted that the proposals, if put into action, would not compromise the privacy of the public. However, officials revealed that changes to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 would be required so public authorities "can continue to obtain and have access to communications data essential for counter-terrorism and investigation of crime purposes", according to the BBC.
Gov't could track all emails and phone calls

I'm sure it's safe to say the technology exists, and I'm sure it's being implemented.

reply to post by LDragonFire

Good info, thanks -- but couldn't 'keep track of' refer to pen registers instead of complete content recording+storage? Or perhaps voice-keyword triggered monitoring (as the NSA Eschelon system has been rumored to do for decades)?

Title 18 of the United States Code defines a pen register as:

a device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information transmitted by an instrument or facility from which a wire or electronic communication is transmitted, provided, however, that such information shall not include the contents of any communication, but such term does not include any device or process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing, for communications services provided by such provider or any device or process used by a provider or customer of a wire communication service for cost accounting or other like purposes in the ordinary course of its business.

That's one thing that struck me about the Verizon/AT&T call record 'leak' news a few years back -- it was widely assumed in the news media that only pen register information was involved, not communications content. Was that the case?

I thought this thread would inform me on how to tell if my phone is tapped. My phone ain't tapped.

reply to post by downtown436


Recorded using what? The DMS systems currently in use for regular tip and ring land lines is a 30 year old technology. Most major companies still use the DMS-100 systems because they are cheap, easy to maintain, and since there really hasnt been much change in plain old telephone service in years there is no reason to change the machines since newer technologies wouldnt make any improvements at all. DMS systems cannot record calls.

Here are the facts: Myself or any other technician i know have NEVER seen recording equipment in our switching stations and none of us have EVER seen tens of thousands of cable pairs running from our swtiching stations to government facilities. These are the only two things you could use to record regular land lines.

You CAN record calls with Voip service, however, the solution to this is don't purchase voip service. Other than its long distance capabilities it really is an inferior technology due to all the dropped calls and absence of 911 service. One of our local cable companies uses a system similer to our DMS-100 systems to provide phone service rather than voip because they feel that voip is inferior.

Plain old telephone service DOES have the same long distance capabilities as voip its just that to justify the infrastructure costs it must charge a little extra. Most voip carriers are thrid party and dont have to pay infrastructure costs. The major voip carriers that have their own network have to sell additional services to produce the amout of money necessary to maintain the network.

SO you see, just dont subscribe to voip and you can't be recorded.

reply to post by Dulcimer


Heres a way to tell if your phone is tapped. A few simple questions.

Do you belong to some form of mafia, biker gang, crime syndicate, major street gang, or perhaps you are a drug kingpin?

Have you been deemed by the courts to be a dangerous repeat offender or felon? Have you committed murder and recently released? Do you own a marijuana grow up the likes that have not been seen in decades?

Are you deep in some sort of secret military black ops or work for area 51 or were involved in any type of event that has not yet had any kind of disclosure to the public?

Do you subscribe to voip?

If you answered NO to all of the above then the answer is no, your phone is not tapped.


I challange anyone to offer proof that plain old telephone service is being recorded on a massive scale and i will investigate such claims personally as i have access to switching facilities. I challange any telco tech to come forward and state and provide proof that such equipment exists. Proof can be presented in the form of pictures as cameras are allowed in our facilities since there are no secrets and also because telephone service is ages old and theres nothing that one company has over the other on a technological level.

[edit on 08/7/15 by metaldemon2000]