HOW DOES IT WORK?

 

Placing a tap on a phone line used to be tough. The cops had to pay phone company technicians to physically connect a tap line to an existing phone line. Then they had to sit in a really conspicuous van right outside a mobster’s house, listening to cryptic mobster-speak on the phone and waiting for a couple of guys in suits to blow them away with Tommy guns. It was a really tedious and inefficient way to spy on someone.

Nowadays, a phone tap is not a physical device. With a few mouse clicks, the phone company can digitally split a line, diverting a copy of every call to the cops. Where before it might have been the work of hours or days to install a tap, now it takes minutes. The police could be listening in on a conversation before the ink on the warrant is even dry.

Once a tap is installed, you don’t even need to make a phone call for your phone to betray you. Mobile phones are always actively connected to the networks on which they operate, which allows the police—or whoever—to use the microphone in it as a listening device even when your phone is snug in your pocket. Most people would rather lose a hand than be parted from their phone. If the NSA did really want to listen in on everything we did, they could do worse than simply using our mobile security blankets as bugs.

Internet traffic is similarly easy to tap. Your ISP simply diverts a copy of all of your traffic to the agency requesting the tap. It’s like the police just plugged in a second monitor to your computer. Even if they’re not bugging your computer, they may be bugging one of the websites you visit. Some sites that contain what the government considers dangerous ideas are bugged with software that logs the IP address of every visitor. If you’ve been trolling the al Qaeda version of Craigslist lately, the FBI probably has your number.

Not every phone tap requires the cooperation of the phone companies. The old-fashioned methods still work, and if someone is interested in spying on you and has physical access to your phone, there are a number of options. The first is to plant a microphone equipped with a transmitter directly in or on your phone. Many handsets have at least a little bit of room inside them for a device that is sufficiently small, and careful placement can ensure that both sides of a conversation are picked up.

If you’ve got a land line, a secret tap is easy to install. You may have seen the portable plastic handsets carried by phone company technicians—those are specifically designed for tapping into a phone line to check signal strength. They’re also cheap and easy to build. Someone with a reason to listen in on you could attach one to the transmission lines leading into your home, power a transmitter directly off the phone line, and sit nearby listening to you make plans to meet your friends for brunch.

The third method requires something called an induction coil—a coil of copper wire wrapped around an iron core—attached directly to your telephone. Once attached, it will pick up the electrical impulses from your phone, which are then transmitted to a nearby computer and translated back into sound. This is not a subtle listening device; it needs to be physically on the telephone. So if your Droid sprouts a little bundle of copper wire, you’ve got a stupid electrical engineer stalking you.

Tapping your Internet connection is much more complex, but also more difficult to detect. A physical monitoring device could be attached to the cables running from your computer, but that method shares the obvious flaws of physical phone-tapping techniques. Someone interested in keeping an eye on your online behavior would be far better served by installing malicious software on your computer. A trojan program can capture a copy of everything you do on your machine and send it along to your spy whenever an Internet connection becomes available. Such software could be delivered to your computer in an e-mail or physically installed at the same time the creepy bastard is installing the induction coil on your phone.