In October of last year a friend and I were talking over lunch about this very issue, and we tried to figure out a way to solve the problem. We came up with some pretty good ideas.

I didn't think any more about it until January when I'm over at his place and he hands me this little black plastic rectangular device roughly 1.5”x0.5”x0.25”. A 3.5 mm male audio connector on a short cable was coming out at one end of the device, and at the other end a female 3.5 mm audio connector jack was mounted. On the big top surface a flush sliding switch, and on the side a USB port with a tiny micro USB stick in it. I asked him what he handed me and he tells me it's the device we'd talked about in October. He made one for himself and one for me.

Core to the ideas we'd discussed was building a little audio scrambler that would attach inline to use with any standard headset. We'd wanted to do everything in software, since that would be so much easier and cleaner (and anyone could install it). Hacking the audio drivers would have been difficult and possibly ineffective, since we couldn't be sure eavesdropping couldn't happen at the hardware level. So the best solution we could come up with was a little hardware based scrambler.

And he built it! I know almost nothing about hardware so I'd given up the idea, but my friend had been an EE in a previous career and apparently remembered enough to pull this off. This little device he made had a programmable chip rigged to a ADC, DAC, USB port, all powered by a few button cell batteries. I was really impressed when he told me what the USB memory stick was for. Not only did the key encryption code reside on the chip, but it also stored data for the one time pad (OTP) he used to further secure the encryption layer.

Here's how a call worked... The audio was encrypted on the way out (microphone) and decrypted on the way in (headphones) as long as the top switch was in the on position. If we called each other and had our scramblers attached we could just make a regular call over the cell phone network and anyone listening in would just hear something like modem noise; his scrambler would descramble my audio and his mine. If we wanted to call a regular person on their cell phone or landline we have to use a SIP client (software similar to Skype) on our iPhones. This SIP client is configured to route the calls through a little software SIP gateway he placed on a server he runs overseas. He modified an existing open source SIP server to scramble and descramble the audio in the same way that our hardware scramblers do. His SIP gateway scrambles/descrambles the audio then routes the call through a regular thirdparty SIP network, and on to whoever I want to call. And for security he can switch SIP accounts (phone numbers) whenever he likes.

It's quite an impressive system, but the call quality is rough! It does what he set out for it to do, but it's not the sort of thing you'd want to use unless you were trying to communicate something sensitive. With the encryption, the latency of the foreign server, the latency of the rerouting through the remote gateway, the latency of the thirdparty SIP network, and the layers of audio compression, the resulting audio has a painful lag and sounds very compressed. Ah well, those aren't his fault!

To make his phone more secure he physically disabled the built in microphone on his own iPhone. I'm not as paranoid, so I left mine alone for now.

John

A month after that he told me he'd written an app that effectively disables the GPS on his iPhone so if anyone was spying on his cell phone it couldn't get the GPS data from it. He said he found some command he could send to the GPS module to force it to reset, and his program would keep forcing a reset often enough to prevent the module from ever acquiring a lock on the satellites. A nice little hack, but obviously with the ability of cell phone companies to triangulate a cell phone's position based on multiple cell towers, this hack is of limited value. He said he had an idea for a hack that might allow him to force his phone to lock onto only one cell tower and prevent it from communicating with any others without his consent. They wouldn't be able to triangulate your position if you're only talking to one tower. They can guess your range from the tower, but they wouldn't know in which direction you were. Obviously it wouldn't be the sort of thing you'd use all the time since switching between cells is the whole way cell phones work to make your phone. This would be an app he'd need to enable or disable as needed when he was pretty much stationary. I am deeply skeptical of his being able to get this hack working, I strongly suspect all the stuff he needs to interrupt is hardware based and he won't have the time, patience, or equipment to bypass it. If anyone can, though he can.

Anyway, this guy is an uber genius. It's fun to see what he's capable of.

John

We can be spied on through our cell phone-and our sattelite tv if phone line is connected--and of cource your land line---
unplug phone-keep answering machine out of house--[very easy]-and keep battery out of cell phone unless calling--keep phone cord disconnected from sat. reciever.
you can be tracked in real time with cell phone whether its on or off-
great article at -----citizens for legitimate government.com

Originally posted by alphabet123
The government can access your phone even when the battery is removed. I am not ENTIRELY positive of the technology, but I do know that the power comes from either the capacitors and batteries inside the phone, or uses transducers to pick up ambient and broadcast frequencies in the air and uses them to power the microphone and outgoing transmissions. It works in a way similar to the Powermat charger device that has recently come out.

...

After this post, I'm probably going to destroy my computer, they are most definitely concerned with what I know about all of this.

I think you are just having fun with people given the way you ended your post.

What you say is untrue. None of the power sources you list are plausible. A cell phone broadcasting requires non-insignificant current. I've taken apart many cell phones and I can assure you there is no extra room to hide batteries of any capacity. Further, there are no capacitors large enough to store the charge you'd need, nor are capacitors best suited for this use. And the Powermat device requires your devices be placed within millimeters of the mat for it to work, the ability to induce a current falls off exponentially over distance. And using a radio signal as a power source is similarly problematic, the radio signal broadcast would need to be massive and would fall off so rapidly over distance as to be useless. They are having some mild success in being able to transmit some power to remote devices but only be a directed microwave signal (not an omnidirectional signal). If you were making a mild claim, such as cell phones can ping nearby towers for up to 20 minutes after the battery is removed, through a tiny batter or capacitor, that maybe I could buy, but to suggest they can send audio for anything more than 30 seconds (through some similar tiny battery or capacitor) would be nonsense.

John

No need now to spend many dollars to spy a cell phone.
download the freeware COPY9 at www.spytic.com
(Compatible iPhone, iPad, Android, Symbian, Windows mobile)