[IP] more on How To Tell If Your Cell Phone Is Bugged
Begin forwarded message:
From: DV Henkel-Wallace <dvhw@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 5, 2006 6:56:02 AM EST
To: Phil Karn <karn@xxxxxxxx>, Lauren Weinstein <lauren@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on How To Tell If Your Cell Phone Is Bugged
Phil (and Dave),
You bring up an interesting and disturbing social phenomenon.
The fact that phones have been buggable for years is well known. Few
dispute the principle that law enforcement can have a legitimate need
to bug a telephone for the general welfare. What does get debated is
what controls and bounds should exist over such bugging and what
lengths non-law-enforcement should need to go to to support it (e.g.
CALEA).
Somehow this tracking information has been immune to such controls
and has been used in civil and criminal cases for years without any
discussion. Are phone taps ever legitimately used in purely civil
cases (e.g. divorce cases) or misdemeanors (e.g. speeding)?
We nerds can argue about what our social responsibility is, but I
think it ought just be to help frame debates like this. Trying to do
so via publicity is probably too hard, as engineering schools neither
teach it nor select for students with an aptitude for it. But come
to think of it, IEEE and IETF probably ought to recommend that every
protocol or standard have a "privacy" review phase as well. It's not
like many of the standard protocols have any sort of privacy built
in...that may be the best "advocacy" of all.
End users can't make a choice if the choice is never there.
-g
From: Phil Karn <karn@xxxxxxxx>
Date: December 4, 2006 9:26:42 PM EST
Personally I am much more concerned about the use of mobile phones
as physical tracking devices than as audio bugs.
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