wiretap \wiretap\ v. t. to tap[5] (a telephone or
telegraph line) to get information surreptitiously; also, to obtain
or record (information) by use of a wiretap. [WordNet 1.5]
Word Net
wiretap n : the act of tapping a telephone or telegraph line to get information [syn: tap] v : tap a telephone or telegraph wire to get information; "The FBI was tapping the phone line of the suspected spy"; "Is this hotel room bugged?" [syn: tap, intercept, bug]Moby Thesaurus
attend, attend to, auscultate, be all ears, bend an ear, bug, bugging, cloak-and-dagger work, cock the ears, counterespionage, counterintelligence, eavesdrop, electronic surveillance, espial, espionage, examine by ear, following, give attention, give audience to, give ear, hark, hear, hear out, hearken, heed, intelligence, intelligence work, intercept, lend an ear, listen, listen at, listen in, listen to, military intelligence, observation, secret police, secret service, shadowing, sit in on, spying, stakeout, surveillance, tailing, tap, trailing, wiretappingEnglish
Noun
- a concealed device connected to a telephone or other communications system that allows a third party to listen or record conversations
- the act of installing such a device
Verb
to wiretap- To install or to use such a device
Derived terms
- Wiretap redirects here. For the radio program, see WireTap (radio program)
Passive wiretapping attempts only to observe the
flow and gain knowledge of the information it contains. Active
wiretapping attempts to alter the data or otherwise affect the flow
of data.
Legal status
Telephone tapping is officially strictly
controlled in many countries to safeguard an individual's privacy; this is the case in all
developed democracies.
In theory, telephone tapping often needs to be authorized by a
court, and is, again in
theory, normally only approved when evidence
shows it is not possible to detect criminal or subversive activity in less
intrusive ways; often the law and regulations require that the
crime investigated must be at least of a certain severity. In many
jurisdictions however, permission for telephone tapping is easily
obtained on a routine basis without further investigation by the
court or other entity granting such permission. Illegal or
unauthorised telephone tapping is often a criminal offense.
However, in certain jurisdictions such as Germany, courts
will accept illegally recorded phone calls without the other
party's consent as evidence.
In the United
States, federal agencies may be authorized to engage in
wiretaps by the
United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a court
with secret proceedings, in certain circumstances.
Under United States federal law and most state
laws there is nothing illegal about one of the parties to a
telephone call recording the conversation, or giving permission for
calls to be recorded or permitting their telephone line to be
tapped. However the Telephone
recording laws in some U.S. states require only one party to be
aware of the recording, while other states require both parties to
be aware. It is considered better practice to announce at the
beginning of a call that the conversation is being recorded.
Methods
Official use
The contracts or licenses by which the state controls telephone companies often require that the companies must provide access for tapping lines to the security services and the police. In the U.S., telecommunications carriers are required by law to cooperate in the interception of communications for law enforcement purposes under the terms of CALEA.When telephone
exchanges were mechanical, a tap had to be installed by
technicians, linking circuits together to route the audio signal
from the call. Now that many exchanges have been converted to
digital technology tapping is far simpler and can be ordered
remotely by computer.
Telephone services provided by cable TV
companies also use digital switching technology. If the tap is
implemented at a digital
switch, the switching computer simply copies the digitized bits
that represent the phone conversation to a second line and it is
impossible to tell whether a line is being tapped. A well-designed
tap installed on a phone wire can be difficult to detect. The
noises that some people believe to be telephone taps are simply
crosstalk created by
the coupling
of signals from other phone lines.
Data on the calling and called number, time of
call and duration, will generally be collected automatically on all
calls and stored for later use by the billing department of the phone
company. These data can be accessed by security services, often
with fewer legal restrictions than for a tap. This information used
to be collected using special equipment known as pen
registers and trap
and trace devices and U.S. law still refers to it under those
names. Today, a list of all calls to a specific number can be
obtained by sorting billing records. A telephone tap during which
only the call information is recorded but not the contents of the
phone calls themselves, is called a pen register tap.
For telephone services via digital exchanges, the
information collected may additionally include a log of the type of
communications media being used (some services treat data and voice
communications differently to conserve bandwidth).
Unofficial use
It is also possible to tap conversations unofficially. There are a number of ways to monitor telephone conversations:- Recording the conversation - the person making/receiving the call records the conversation using a coil tap (telephone pickup coil) attached to the ear-piece, or they fit an in-line tap with a recording output. Both of these are easily available through electrical shops. A more modern alternative is to use telephone recording devices connected to computers, such as call recording software.
- Direct line tap - involves a direct electrical connection to the line using a Butt set or a Beige box, or an induction coil. An induction coil is usually placed underneath the base of a telephone or on the back of a telephone handset to pick up the signal inductively. With a direct connection, there will be some drop in signal levels because of the loss of power from the line, and it may also generate noise on the line. A well designed induction tap does not drain voltage or current from the line because it isn't physically connected to the phone line. Direct taps sometimes require regular maintenance, either to change tapes or replace batteries, which may give away their presence.
- Radio tap - this is like a bug that fits on the telephone line. It can be fitted to one phone inside the house, or outside on the phone line. It may produce noise (there might even be signal feedback on the monitored line on poorly made equipment) to inadvertently alert the caller. Modern state of the art equipment operates in the 30-300 GHz range. The unit is powered from the line to be maintenance free, and only transmits when a call is in progress. These devices tend to be low powered because the drain on the line would become too great, however a state of the art receiver could be located as far away as ten kilometers under ideal conditions, but is usually located within a radius of 1 to 3 km. Research however has also shown that a satellite can be used to receive emissions in the range of a few milliwatts.
- Cordless phones Many cordless phones can be listened to without modification by using a radio scanner.
Location data
Mobile phones are, in surveillance terms, a major liability. This liability will only increase as the new third-generation (3G) phones are introduced, as the base stations will be located closer together. For mobile phones the major threat is the collection of communications data. This data does not only include information about the time, duration, originator and recipient of the call, but also the identification of the base station where the call was made from, which equals its approximate geographical location. This data is stored with the details of the call and has utmost importance for traffic analysis.It is also possible to get greater resolution of
a phone's location by combining information from a number of cells
surrounding the location, which cells routinely communicate (to
agree on the next handoff—for a moving phone) and measuring the
timing
advance, a correction for the speed of light in the
GSM standard. This additional precision must be specifically
enabled by the telephone company - it is not part of ordinary
operation.
The second generation mobile phones (circa 1978
through 1990) could be easily monitored by anyone with a 'scanning
all-band receiver' because the system used an analog
transmission system-like an ordinary radio transmitter. The third
generation digital phones are harder to monitor because they use
digitally-encoded and compressed transmission. However the
government can tap mobile phones with the cooperation of the phone
company. It is also possible for organizations with the correct
technical equipment to monitor mobile phone communications and
decrypt the audio. A device called an "IMSI-catcher"
pretends to the mobile phones in its vicinity to be a legitimate
base station of the mobile phone network, subjecting the
communication between the phone and the network to a man in
the middle attack. This is possible because while the mobile
phone has to authenticate itself to the mobile telephone network,
the network does not authenticate itself to the phone. Once the
mobile phone has accepted the IMSI-catcher as its base station the
IMSI-catcher can deactivate GSM encryption using a special flag.
All calls made from the tapped mobile phone go through the
IMSI-catcher and are then passed on to the mobile network. Some
phones include a special monitor mode (activated with secret codes
or special software) which displays GSM operating parameters such
as encryption while a call is being made. There is no defense
against IMSI-catcher based eavesdropping, except using end-to-end
call encryption; products offering this feature, secure
telephones, are already beginning to appear on the market,
though they tend to be expensive and incompatible with each other,
which limits their proliferation.
There were proposals for European mobile phones
to use stronger encryption, but this was opposed by a number of
European countries, including the Netherlands and
Germany,
which are among the world's most prolific telephone tappers (over
10,000+ phone numbers in both countries in 2003).
One-ring calls
These calls cannot be recognized by caller ID as a CID displays the caller's number only between the first two rings. The purpose of a one-ring call is usually to determine if a person is using the phone. Accessing the telephone exchange is one way to determine the origin of these calls. Last Call, also known as *69, also gives the CID number even if it only rings once.Internet
Peter Garza, a Special Agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, conducted the first court-ordered Internet wiretap in the United States while investigating Julio Cesar Ardita ("El Griton").As technologies emerge, including VOIP, new questions
are raised about law enforcement access to communications (see
Voip
recording).
The
Internet Engineering Task Force has decided not to consider
requirements for wiretapping as part of the process for creating
and maintaining IETF standards (RFC 2804).
Webtapping
Webtapping is a term that refers to the practice of logging the IP addresses of users that access certain websites. Webtapping is used to monitor websites that presumably contain dangerous or sensitive materials, and the people that access them. Though it is allowed by the USA PATRIOT Act, it is considered by many to be at the very least a questionable practice, if not an all-out violation of civil liberties.History
During the American Civil War, government officials under President Abraham Lincoln eavesdropped on telegraph conversations. Telephone wiretapping began in the 1890s, following the invention of the telephone recorder. Wiretapping has also been carried out under most Presidents, usually with a lawful warrant since the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional in 1928. Domestic wiretapping under the Clinton administration led to the capture of Aldrich Ames, a former Soviet spy in 1994. US Senator Robert F. Kennedy monitored the activity of Martin Luther King Jr. by wiretapping in 1966.Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and
the subsequent entry of the United States into World War II, the
U.S. House of Representatives held hearings on the legality of
wiretapping for national defense. Significant legislation and
judicial decisions on the legality and constitutionality of
wiretapping had taken place years before World War II. However, it
took on new urgency at that time of national crisis.The actions of
the government regarding wiretapping for the purpose of national
defense in the current war on terror have drawn considerable
attention and criticism. In the World War II era, the public was
also aware of the controversy over the question of the
constitutionality and legality of wiretapping. Furthermore, the
public was concerned with the decisions that the legislative and
judicial branches of the government were making regarding
wiretapping.
In the
Greek telephone tapping case 2004-2005 more than 100 mobile
phone numbers belonging mostly to members of the Greek government,
including the Prime
Minister of Greece, and top-ranking civil servants were found
to have been illegally tapped for a period of at least one year.
The Greek government concluded this had been done by a foreign
intelligence agency, for security reasons related to the 2004
Olympic Games, by unlawfully activating the lawful interception
subsystem of the Vodafone
Greece mobile network. The most recent case of U.S. wiretapping
was the
NSA warrantless surveillance controversy discovered in December
2005. It aroused much controversy, after President George W.
Bush admitted to violating a specific federal statute (FISA)
and the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment to the United
States Constitution. The President claimed his authorization was
consistent with other federal statutes (AUMF) and other
provisions of the Constitution, was necessary to keep America safe
from terrorism, and
could lead to the capture of notorious terrorists responsible for
9/11.
In the most recent issue concerning warrantless
wiretapping, earlier in 2007 a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA) court ruled that it increased restraints on the National
Security Agency (NSA). The new court ruling requires the NSA to
obtain a warrant when intercepting or eavesdropping on
foreign-to-foreign intelligence if it passes through any U.S.
networks. The Bush Administration in response to this passed a
stopgap legislation very quickly through congress that only
temporarily relieves the NSA of this prior ruling. Director of
National Intelligence Mike McConnell said to Congress that the new
ruling could potentially decrease the amount of useful information
they collected on groups like al Qaeda by almost two thirds. He
also stated that applying for a warrant can run up to 90 pages and
can be time consuming and labor intensive.
Very active in this issue is The American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU has brought about many legal cases
challenging the constitutionality of the bill, inserting that it
violates our right to free speech and privacy. They have filed
lawsuits, motions, and complaints in over 27 states so far to
oppose any legislation that encourages unchecked government
surveillance. In response to the government arguments, Caroline
Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office has
said of the bill: “Where will Congress go from here? More
unfettered power for an administration that has no respect for the
privacy of the citizenry that elected it?”
The stopgap that was hastily put in place by the
Bush Administration expires in February 2008 but Congress and FISA
are trying to reach a compromise on the details of the bill to be
passed. To reach a compromise both sides are reaching a middle
ground on determining when a warrant is or is not necessary. ACLU
advocates are pushing to require NSA to provide individual warrants
when Americans are involved and on the other hand, U.S.
intelligence agencies and the Administration would like as few
obstacles in their way of intercepting private information. Both
sides have both shown the possibility for a compromise to accept a
Bill that would require a FISA court to approve NSA’s procedures
while intercepting foreign intelligence when it involves Americans.
The Bush Administration has acknowledged that intelligence agencies
conducted warrantless eavesdropping on Americans with the help of
Telecom companies such as Verizon, AT&T, and Qwest. All three
of these Telecom companies face multiple civil lawsuits related to
their handling of phone records and the passing of this bill would
grant them immunity.
In favor of the bill, McConnell has said, such
immunity is necessary to prevent the telecoms from being bankrupted
and to encourage them to continue to cooperate with intelligence
agencies. Bush has said that he will veto any intelligence bill
passed that does not include immunity. Liz Rose, spokeswoman for
the Washington office of the ACLU, says the language of the bill is
a "blank check" that would cover not only the warrantless
wiretapping program the Bush administration has acknowledged, but
any unconfirmed or previously unknown program. Sen. Russ Feingold,
D-Wis., promised to lead a filibuster to block approval of
retroactive immunity. "Retroactive immunity set the terrible
precedent that breaking the law is permissible and companies need
not worry about the privacy of their customers," Feingold
said.
The bill now goes to the Senate Judiciary
Committee, and in the Senate, committees have split on how to
handle immunity. With many senators outspoken about their
reservations of the bill, more information is needed to continue
the proceedings. For now, legislation is stalled in the
House.
References
External links
- A guide to whether phone conversations can be taped in the United States
- Administrative Office of the United States Courts reports on phone tapping
- RFC 2804
- How Stuff Works: A guide on wiretapping, how it works and links to other resources.
- List of U.S. States with two party or one party consent laws
- Guide to lawful intercept legislation around the world
- Privacy Laws by State
- In Pellicano Case, Lessons in Wiretapping Skills NYTimes May 5 2008
- Lawyers for Guantanamo Inmates Accuse US of Eavesdropping NYTimes May 7 2008
wiretap in German:
Telekommunikationsüberwachung
wiretap in Spanish: Escucha telefónica
wiretap in French: Écoute téléphonique
wiretap in Hebrew: האזנת סתר
wiretap in Japanese: 盗聴
wiretap in Simple English: Telephone
tapping