more on How To Tell If Your Cell Phone Is Bugged

Begin forwarded message:

From: DV Henkel-Wallace <[email protected]>
Date: December 5, 2006 6:56:02 AM EST
To: Phil Karn <[email protected]>, Lauren Weinstein <[email protected]>
Cc: David Farber <[email protected]>
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 <[email protected]>
> 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.