Before CALEA, surveillance was not "built in" to the phone system. Back when Guliani was a prosecutor, taking down the New York mafia, he wrote in his book that the FBI had to pay New York Telephone for a wired connection into any phone they wanted to tap. It really was a wired connection, manually wired onto the main distributing frame, and billed as a private line to a third location. On one occasion the FBI didn't pay their bill, and New York Telephone billed the party being wiretapped. That was part of the motivation behind CALEA.
Electromechanical end exchanges did not log call data for local calls. Some of them counted it, with racks of little counters, read once a month. Toll switches had a logging system involving a wide paper tape. No cheap storage devices existed in the electromechanical era.
What's now referred to as a "pen register" is today an extract from switch logs. But at one time, it was a real physical device. A device that put dashes on a paper tape to log dial pulses. I own one, and it's the one shown in Wikipedia.[1] Mine is hooked up to a dial and some circuitry for demos. You wind it up with a big brass key. The first dial pulse starts the clockwork moving, and it continues to run until there have been no dial pulses for a few seconds. Someone had to hook one of these up to a specific line to track what was being dialed.
That's what the Supreme Court was talking about when, in Smith vs. Maryland, Justice Blackmun wrote "Given a pen register's limited capabilities, therefore, petitioner's argument that its installation and use constituted a "search" necessarily rests upon a claim that he had a "legitimate expectation of privacy" regarding the numbers he dialed on his phone."
The "limited capabilities" are a lot less limited today than they were in the wind-up era.
I remember a conspiracy theory that you could find out if your phone was tapped by not paying the bill. If the line still worked after you were delinquent, someone else was listening on it.
Kim Dotcom found out that his internet was being tapped by noticing the lag introduced in Call of Duty. He was #1 in the world at Call of Duty at one point.
I would be inclined to agree, but admittedly if you had to route all the traffic to from NZ to a datacenter in the USA, then back to the game server, that could introduce notable latency.
If you want to actively MITM it, sure. If you just want to send a copy of everything to the USA, then it needn't slow down the original connection at all.
> The data showed the internet signal had previously taken two steps before going offshore - but was now taking five.
> Information held by the Herald shows Gen-I studied data showing the amount of time it took information on the internet connection to reach the Xbox server. It went from 30 milliseconds to 180 milliseconds - a huge increase for online gamers.
There’s just no realistic way that bouncing the connection around New Zealand would introduce a ~100ms delay. It sounds like he just started getting bad routes to the gameserver, which is par for the course for Oceania, but unlikely to result from LI.
Could the bad routes to the gameserver be a possible accidental side effect of the intercept?
Maybe the people doing the intercept made a mistake. It sounds like they made a legal mistake, so maybe a technical mistake isn't that far fetched either.
I've never researched it, it's too good to prove wrong. It does seem pretty plausible though, the cops and/or judge that ordered monitoring it would be pretty annoyed if it got cut off.
"Passive aggressive" is exactly how you expect people to behave when you force them to do things they don't particularly want to do -- and follow this up by not paying them for it.
In the 1980s (or maybe the 70s), the UK Parliament debated a bill covering wiretapping. There was a line of questions as to what a lineman should do if he discovered a wiretap, because he couldn't assume it was a 'legitimate' one by the security services, but if he assumed it wasn't he might run afoul of provisions of the law.
This shows a couple of things:
- Back then extensive surveillance would have been hard to conceal because it would have been noticed by the large workforce needed to physically maintain the system.
- At that point members of parliament could reason correctly about the internal details of the telephone network, because it was simpler, and because many MPs had become MPs via the unions and so had experience of a trade.
Electromechanical end exchanges did not log call data for local calls. Some of them counted it, with racks of little counters, read once a month. Toll switches had a logging system involving a wide paper tape. No cheap storage devices existed in the electromechanical era.
What's now referred to as a "pen register" is today an extract from switch logs. But at one time, it was a real physical device. A device that put dashes on a paper tape to log dial pulses. I own one, and it's the one shown in Wikipedia.[1] Mine is hooked up to a dial and some circuitry for demos. You wind it up with a big brass key. The first dial pulse starts the clockwork moving, and it continues to run until there have been no dial pulses for a few seconds. Someone had to hook one of these up to a specific line to track what was being dialed.
That's what the Supreme Court was talking about when, in Smith vs. Maryland, Justice Blackmun wrote "Given a pen register's limited capabilities, therefore, petitioner's argument that its installation and use constituted a "search" necessarily rests upon a claim that he had a "legitimate expectation of privacy" regarding the numbers he dialed on his phone."
The "limited capabilities" are a lot less limited today than they were in the wind-up era.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register