[HN Gopher] When New York City Was a Wiretapper's Dream ___________________________________________________________________ When New York City Was a Wiretapper's Dream Author : bangonkeyboard Score : 75 points Date : 2022-03-25 18:13 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org) (TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org) | toyg wrote: | Just the other day I was watching the classic Sydney Pollack | thriller "The three days of the Condor", with Robert Redford, and | I was thinking they treated NY phone lines as extremely | accessible. At one point, Condor somehow gains access to an | exchange to make a call to his opponents, and proceeds to make | his line appear like coming from dozens of different addresses, | all with a simple tape recorder. | | (it's also funny how in that movie Redford is supposed to be a | hippie ubergeek forced to turn into an action hero - when he's | clearly coolness personified) | tomohawk wrote: | It still is. | | https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-comment-allegations... | etskinner wrote: | The article doesn't really explain: How does equipment + direct | lines to exchanges = wiretap? Were there backdoors in every | exchange that allowed people with the right equipment to listen | in on any subscriber line? If so, couldn't phreaking do the same | thing? | | Also, how did they set up the direct lines all the exchanges? | greenyoda wrote: | As I understood it, the backdoors were the "two rogue employees | of the New York Telephone Company". My guess is that they | spliced a cable from the apartment into larger underground | cables that led into the affected phone exchanges, providing a | number of available wire pairs between the apartment and each | exchange. (There were probably lots of unused pairs in the | underground cables to allow for the addition of new phone | lines.) Then, when the wiretappers wanted to tap a specific | phone line, the phone company employees would be asked to | connect one of the wire pairs going into the wiretapper's | apartment to the victim's wire pair inside the exchange. | arciini wrote: | It's fascinating that the article ends with a very pessimistic | quote, but the implication is clear: wiretapping was immune to | policy solutions, but technical solutions have been far more | effective at solving this problem. | | > Futility was the order of the day. "Most experts believe that | no matter what legislation is enacted, the unhappy outlook as of | now is that wiretapping is here to stay and will increase," | Newsweek reported in an article on "The Busy Wiretappers" in the | spring of 1955. The tumultuous decade that followed proved all of | the predictions right. | | Public-key encryption has brought wiretap-resistant | communications to the mainstream through the Internet in a way | that would've been basically impossible to do at scale in the | analog world. | matheusmoreira wrote: | Yeah. Laws can always be ignored or selectively enforced. | They're worthless paper until something actually happens, and | it will only happen after the fact, after people's rights have | been violated. | | Technology puts a stop to all that by making it harder if not | impossible for them to abuse power in the first place. | echion wrote: | The flip side is also true: technology enables abuses of | power to exist faster than the laws can be enforced. | nathanyz wrote: | Given the timing of when this happened, I am impressed by the | scope and scale of it. If these were truly private individuals | and not related to the 3 letter agencies, then one can only | imagine what must take place in the world of today. | fragmede wrote: | Room 614A is a bit dated by this point, but hopefully gives you | some idea. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A | nyjah wrote: | Room 641A. Thank you for sharing the link/story, absolutely | fascinating. | | "641A is a bit dated", has anything more recent come to | light? | walrus01 wrote: | If you want to see something really interesting, there's the | occasional time when you can see crews working on an open NYC | Verizon (former NY telephone, then NYNEX) manhole in a street | hauling out defunct 600 and 1200 pair copper and associated | splice cases... | | Looks like this, but old and decrepit and dirty. | | https://www.google.com/search?q=1200+pair+phone+cable&client... | [deleted] | mindslight wrote: | Back when I was a kid, my grandfather got a hold of some many- | pair telephone cable. I helped him separate out the individual | pairs and wind them onto separate spindles. It made fantastic | wire for electronics (first model trains, later breadboarding), | given the sheer amount of color combos. I've still got a small | bit kicking around here and there, but now remembering it | fondly, I've got to wonder if it would be possible to find some | more. | twox2 wrote: | I remember when my buddy picked up a lineman's headset almost 2 | decades ago and we ran around connecting it to random lines. Good | times. NYC is one of the best places to grow up as a hacker kid. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-25 23:00 UTC)