PHONING - LESSONS FOR THE PARANOID
Well, actually there is only one tip I can give you if you want to use a telephone, especially a mobile phone, and want to escape the possibility of being screened, scanned and listened to: come to Austria and buy a pre-paid-mobile phone at least every other month and turn it off as much as you can. If you want to escape the eyes of Big Brother completely: don't use telephones at all. Keep in mind: your paranoia is reasonable. In Germany at least 7.000 telephone lines are being bugged a year and the number is rising. It might hit you sometime.
Ever since the European Safety-Laws ENFOPOL were introduced, using a hyped scare of organized crime, rightwing-networks and child-pornography, telephone operators have to provide direct lines into their systems for the police. And modern technology makes bugging operations very very easy. Especially the new digital telephone-networks not only provide clear and noise-free transmission but also carry a lot of secondary information, e.g. the number of caller, an ID and - if you have that ID, a simple database-query will give you all the other information the company has about you. Everytime you call someone, at least length and recieviving number are stored in a database (you'll get an invoice on that basis). That also means, that if someone wants to eavesdrop on you, he doesn't have to wait in a dingy room 24/7 but everytime you use the telephone a second line goes to a digital recorder that stores everything you have spoken about. A mobile phone usually won't help you, since you usually have to register with your name and adress (and sometimes even with a clearance from your bank). There is only one remarkable exception, pre-paid-cards in Austria don't have to be registered (that is, you don't have to send the registry-card in.)
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Be careful what you talk about. The NASA developed a digital wordscanner wich is now in use with many other governments all around the world, so that if you use certain keywords on the phone the wordscanner will pick them up and record whatever you said after that keyword. This protocoll will then be evaluated by secret service and might make a bigger bugging on you necessary. Don't believe me? There are voice-operated mobile phones, aren't there? Then go and check the internet on any (official) information about ECHELON and ILETS and get scared. The main interest are actually dialogues in strange languages, e.g. Chinese or Russian, but you might not want to talk about that "concert, that was a bomb" or that guitarist who is a "real terrorist in his field and attacks the system in every note". |
But if I use a mobile, they at least won't know where I am? Wrong. As long as your mobile is on, it sends a litte signal every few minutes to its nearest net-station, which is nothing more than these small antennas and boxes you see popping up everywhere. That is to provide you with the best service everywhere you are. It also makes is possible to track you down. The network-providers know their net very well, of course, and with some trigonometry and technical trickery (e.g. leading your handy signal to two or three nearby net-stations and the measuring the time-lapse of your handy signal) they can position you within a few metres. Your mobile phone is actually a very neat location finder. Cases have been reported where company owners tracked down their employees with the help of telephone companies. More often the police will want to find some suspect this way.
| True, you can escape all this if you use public phone-booths and on some people can even call you. Have you ever asked yourself, why mobile-phones have been introduced so fast while telephone-networks have been privatized which usually leads to the devastation of public boothes (check the UK where now less than 50 % of public telephone-booths are in working order to before they were privatized.) And, if you don't want to be seen too much, going out into public places is also dangerous. |
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What does that have to do with me? I ain't done nothing wrong! Well, I never believed in the doctrine, that I can give up all my civil rights because I have nothing to fear. If you think that, if I am against the wider range of surveillance the state has over me, then I surely am hiding something, then you are a mistrustful and evil person. Because that means, that to you everyone is a criminal and you are only waiting for them to do something illegal to pick on them. This is usually a very burgeoise dogma, but stupid nevertheless. My right to private sphere is a human right. Hwo would you feel, if you learn your telephone has been bugged for weeks, just because you dialled a wrong number once and that number belonged to a drug dealer. Or because you know someone who knows someone who is a criminal. Everything you said has been recorded and stored. Everywhere you have gone to has been evaluated. Information about you can be gathered in a thousand ways: your bank account, your telephone protocols, your healthcare-data, and don't forget your internet-usage all make up a nice portfolio on who you really are. And even if you are only doing very innocent and profane stuff in your free time, that is of no interest to the secret service.
This is the third millenium - paranoia has become a lifestyle.
