   The New York Times, January 19, 1997, WIR, p. 5.

   At the New Frontier of Eavesdropping 

   By John Markoff

   If only Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio had
   prevailed upon his wife to buy a digital cellular phone
   instead of a conventional analog model. Then, while
   cruising past the waffle shop in Lake City, Fla., John and
   Alice Martin would have merely heard static on their Radio
   Shack scanner instead of House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

   The Florida janitor and his wife, whose recording of the
   Speaker's conversation with Mr. Boehner and some other
   Republican colleagues set off a fight in the House ethics
   committee last week, inadvertently drew national attention
   to the ease with which it is possible to eavesdrop in the
   information age. They also wrote a new chapter in the
   high-tech spy-vs.-spy war that is  as old as American
   communications technology itself.

   As Americans outfit themselves with a dazzling array of
   electronic communications gadgets -- cell phones, portable
   phones, baby monitors, pagers, personal digital assistants,
   interactive cable systems, laptop computers -- their
   expectations of privacy are being redefined.

   Pre-Computer Protections

   This is happening because the rapid emergence of
   consumer-oriented computer and communications technologies
   is exerting powerful pressure on protections legislated in
   the pre-computer era.

   On the one hand, computers, fiber optic and wireless
   communications networks raise the specter of the most
   invasive Orwellian possibilities. But at the same time.
   data scrambling, or cryptography, technologies hold out the
   promise of absolute privacy and anonymity -- a threat so
   fearsome to Government and law enforcement officials that
   until late last year the technology was listed with
   munitions protected from export.

   "Everyone wants to come up with the ultimate privacy
   weapon, but for every weapon there's a counter-weapon for
   snooping," said Alan F. Westin, a political science
   professor at Columbia University.

   By themselves, technological changes have always presented
   a challenge to individual privacy rights. "The entire
   concept is only 100 years old," said Carey Heckman, a
   professor of law at Stanford University. "Privacy is still
   not completely defined."

   The invention of the telegraph in the 1840's was soon
   followed by linemen who would climb the poles to tap the
   wires. That led to states passing anti-telegraph tapping
   laws, but businessmen still carried code books to protect
   their communications.

   In the 1880's and 1890's, anti-telephone wiretapping laws
   quickly followed as the brand new voice communication
   technology reached the mass market. Still, telephone
   eavesdroppers often went undetected.

   As early as the advent of shortwave radio at the beginning
   of this century, laws were enacted to protect the
   confidentiality of ship-to-shore communications, but ham
   radio became a fad as people would sit in their dens and
   listen to the traffic.

   It was only as recently as 1967 that the Supreme Court, in
   Katz v. United States, determined that the F.B.I.'s use of
   electronic devices to listen to and record telephone
   conversations without a warrant constituted a violation of
   the Fourth Amendment's unreasonable search and seizure
   provisions.

   That ruling defined many modern notions about privacy and
   freedom from high-tech surveillance. But while the 1986
   Electronic Communications Privacy Act extended earlier laws
   to include privacy protection for cellular telephone users,
   it also reduced the penalty for intercepting such
   communications from a felony to a $500 fine.

   Moreover, the law specifically exempted from protection
   eavesdropping on electronic transmissions between home
   portable telephones and base stations.

   The Martins, it seems, were simply taking part in an
   increasingly popular American sport: eavesdropping on their
   neighbors by using radio scanning devices.

   The Martins, who said they happened upon the Republicans'
   call when the vacationing Mr. Boehner drove into their
   cellular neighborhood, say they taped the conversation,
   using a small recorder they carried in their car, to pass
   on to their grandchildren.

   While intercepting calls is clearly illegal, there is no
   shortage of easily available and simple modifications to
   over-the-counter radio scanners to permit tapping into
   supposedly off-limits cellular frequencies.

   Indeed, there's no need to even go to the trouble of
   modifying the scanner, standard cellular phones come
   equipped with the built-in capability to scan the same
   radio frequencies. It's only necessary to find the World
   Wide Web page where some radio-scanning enthusiast has
   posted the secret-key sequence to transform a standard cell
   phone into a scanner. Several models on the market today
   contain this feature, supposedly hidden in the innards of
   the palm-sized electronic devices for technicians
   performing diagnostics and repairs.

   E-Mail Alert

   Moreover, the advent of computer technologies and the
   Internet have given broad new power to high-tech snoops. A
   thriving computer underground makes use of secret programs
   called packet filters to conduct surveillance on the
   millions of electronic mail messages sent every day. Unlike
   cellular telephone snooping, which can only pick up a
   conversation within a range of a mile or so packet filters
   permit data thieves to target all communications from a
   single address invisibly making copies of targeted messages
   to be read later.

   Digital cellular phones provide limited protection from
   casual eavesdroppers -- they require the power of a
   computer, and not merely a tampering with the frequencies.
   to interpret a signal -- but real privacy protection is
   likely to be elusive in the wireless digital era as well.

   Many phone companies are now rushing to introduce new
   digital services that provide better sound quality. But
   when security standards were set for the new systems five
   years ago, technical experts from the Government
   discouraged the phone companies from building in coding
   systems that would be difficult to break. Moreover, the
   phone companies themselves decided that real privacy was
   not a major issue.

    "Time to market turned out to be more important than real
   security," said John Gilmore, a board member of the
   Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated
   to protecting privacy rights.

   Indeed, in recent weeks the supposedly secret formula for
   scrambling digital wireless phone calls was posted to an
   Internet mailing list. That virtually insures that hackers
   will soon create a way to modify scanners like the one the
   Martins used, making digital calls just as vulnerable as
   analog calls are today.

   "There's a period in which privacy prevails over
   surveillance," said Mr. Westin, "but it's never for very
   long."

   [End]






