I said:

I said: "The voice is in most instances (AFAIK) not encrypted."

Paul Ash is right. 2G is "encrypted" with CMEA, but that's not very secure.

May have been my first memory was right. See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_Message_Encryption_Algorithm

In cryptography, the Cellular Message Encryption Algorithm (CMEA) is a block cipher which was used for securing mobile phones in the United States. CMEA is one of four cryptographic primitives specified in a Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) standard, and is designed to encrypt the control channel, rather than the voice data.

I thought I'd heard that the code for the cntrol channel had been broken.

Can't say for sure about data channel encrytation; it may not exist. At the time, I think they were more worried that people would hack into the control channel and steal authentication, and thus be able to get free calls and/or clone phones, rather than busybodies putting together lots of circuitry just to listen to random neighbours talking in some cell zone....

Cheers,

I said: "The voice is in most instances (AFAIK) not encrypted."

Paul Ash is right. 2G is "encrypted" with CMEA, but that's not very secure.

Cheers,

Anyone know how digital cellular is encrypted?

Fairly weak encryptation (small key size, and with shared secret keys). Someone broke the IS-41 encryptation a while back using a PC. And this is for the signalling (i.e., authentication and calling info), not the voice. The voice is in most instances (AFAIK) not encrypted.

In IS-95/AMPS/NAMPS (analog cellular), the voice could be picked up by pretty standard RF receivers. Bit tougher with digital cellular (you'd need the special circitry that does the TDMA or CDMA [more difficult] decode, but not impossible).

Cheers,

While folks here celebrate the potential crippling of what may be our only remaining intelligence asset, here's something I find more interesting.... Congress spends our money without voting on it. That's right, it's apparently outside the normal constitutional process.

Would that be that mysterious insertion of new language into a bill after passage by both houses? That was a Republican who did that....

Earmarks are dispensed with no oversight other than one man's say so. With any luck at all, Bush will hijack those thousands of earmarks and direct the money elsewhere.

So your "fix" for the 'problem' is to leave it to Dubya to hand out as he pleases, without accountability and without debate?!?!? Gee, I can see that you're really concerned with the process....

Heh.

Try grunting instead. Works a bit better to get the sh*t loose.

Cheers,

He needs to be challenged in his re-election bid in Nevada where apparently he's in trouble according to the polls there.

Glenn is being way too hard on Paul Kane, the reporter. All Kane did was report on what the congresspeople were up to, yet Glenn says that Kane is a dupe.

This kind of hysteria and exaggeration diminshes Glenn's usually right-on arguments.

I have no trouble believing this at all, in fact it explains a great deal.

Many people will balk at your idea of course. I mean it is kind of hard to believe that the same people who lied us into war and killed over a million Iraqi's inter alia, would stoop to blackmail!

this is why everyone is so eager to roll over for them.

they can't touch Feingold or Dodd because (unlike most of our elected representatives) the NSA hasn't got any electronic dirt on them.

scoff if you like. imagine for a minute that Bushco IS using secretly gathered wiretaps and email taps to intimidate the competition, as well as members of the media establishment.

think how chilling it would be to receive a phone call at 2am replaying a conversation you had with your mistress, or an email with all of the links you surfed for the last two months.

1984 is alive and well. AT&T - your world, delivered, indeed...

Many mistakenly assume this adminstration is out to establish a new order based on executive privilage. No. They are out to establish a new order based on privilage- period.

The common thread that runs through all their efforts is advancing the interests of any powerful or privilaged person or institution: First world countries, oil companies, health care & drug industry, corporate management, shadowy intelligence organizations, wealthy militias, rich friends, developers, banks, blue bloods & WASPs, hunters, etc.. They pit themselves against some of the most vulnerable and powerless on earth, respectively: poor, defenseless nations, working class commuters, sick people and children, labor, unindicted prisoners, unarmed citizenary, middle class, first time home owners, borrowers, immigrants & minorities, deer, etc.

This may explain why not just their own partisans, but other privilaged entities, from elite media to powerful democrats find common cause with them

But the cherry on top of this disgrace is just who they found to lead this crusade againt the under-privilaged: a poster child of privilage, the son of a former president and grandson of a US Senator who went to an elite school he'd never ordinarily qualify for, beat legal raps he's never disputed, got out of fighting a war he supported, made money at businesses he knew nothing about, and presided over an office he never sqarely was elected to.

Another image came to me unbidden after I posted my last comment, Ché -- that great fortress of paranoia under the mountain in Colorado. The global command center on springs, by all accounts now as much a mouldering relic as the earlier congressional bolthole under the Greenbriar. These new data centers strike me as the same sort of beast, as useless in any real sense as the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, or as the boar's extra accoutrements celebrated in that famous Southern proverb shown above.

Congratulations on your blog! Bookmark has been added! Is that your picture at the top? Handsome devil.

Homeland, enemy combattants,war on drugs, tsars,illegal aliens/immigrants....

Look also at the number of new prisons which were built (many I believe by Hall.)

Look also at the way Homeland security was setup now-so that all agencies-even state police-Chertoff has at his disposal to order covert arrests on.

This has already been done-and is not Orwellian prediction.In Operation Falcon a number in the tens of thousands of Mexican workers were rounded up under this very Chertoff direction.

So now with homeland security guiding state agencies-think about it-anyone whom the government decides is a threat to them-can be rounded up as "an enemy combattant-as opposed to the usual wording of POW (being war-specific).

Then we discover this adminstration tortures "enemy combattants" and can "rendition them to other countries".

Last week, the WH also made it legal for itself to kidnap anyone from foreign countries even-disregarding those countries' laws.

Chertoff, as I have been jumping up and down about SCREAMING on Glenn' posts-have outsourced many companies that do biz with telecoms (3rd party, billing...)to other countries,giving them the ability to spy also. Our own govt. can bypass its' own agencies to find info-and get it directly from foreign countries. Foreign countries which have their own interests first over the USs'. (I've read Microsoft has backdoor opportunity for spying...perhaps that is what the Govt case was about back in the late 80's-a method to strongarm Microsoft.)

A court a few weeks ago-threw out much of the Patriot Act declaring the wording too vague for the average American to be able to understand.

Of course I think it was meant to be vague-meant to confuse not only Americans-but other politicians as well.But instead of any politicians asking about clarification on the wording (Patriot Act, MTC Act, Wiretapp..)-they went by thier own interpretations-(which could be many).

I think it's high time politicians pulled the WH into a joint panel and ASK the WH to clarify and simplify the language on.

Should the WH continue to send bills up for passage-make them explain it-or make it "null & void" until they do.

Connect the dots about the big picture of what this WH is trying to do.