[mdlug] Curious - Phone Tapping Tech

[Michael Mol]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 11:21 AM, Robert Adkins II <radkins at impelind.com> wrote:
> I am curious to know if phone tapping technology has "caught up" with
> Holywood. In terms of being able to take a band and wrap it around a bundle
> of phone lines and call that a tapped line.
>
> I'm curious, because everything that I know regarding this technology
> requires that each individual line be physically tapped/connected to in
> order to obtain anything.
>
> I'm talking about Plain Old Telephone Service. Nothing fancy like IP based
> or similar.

Oh, sure. When I was a kid, I could hear my parents' telephone
conversations by picking up the second phone line; it's called
crosstalk, and it's a form of accidental inductive coupling.

They've probably been making the accidental intentional since WWII.

Doing the same thing with a *bundle* of cables would be a bit
tricker...but you could probably do a decent job filtering crap out
with enough signal processing. Filtering out DSL frequencies to start,
then finding any frequency band groups that stop and start (as would
happen with a human vocal conversation), and locking in on those.
Eventually, you'd need to get a human involved to separate out
overlapping conversations.

Though, no, I don't expect you could wrap around a bundle of cables
and hone in on a specific copper pair. It might be easier just to get
the circuit on the copper pair physically closest to the one you're
interested in. "Joe? Eavesdropper on line two."

-- 
:wq