[HN Gopher] When New York City Was a Wiretapper's Dream
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When New York City Was a Wiretapper's Dream
Author : bangonkeyboard
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-03-25 18:13 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| toyg wrote:
| Just the other day I was watching the classic Sydney Pollack
| thriller "The three days of the Condor", with Robert Redford, and
| I was thinking they treated NY phone lines as extremely
| accessible. At one point, Condor somehow gains access to an
| exchange to make a call to his opponents, and proceeds to make
| his line appear like coming from dozens of different addresses,
| all with a simple tape recorder.
|
| (it's also funny how in that movie Redford is supposed to be a
| hippie ubergeek forced to turn into an action hero - when he's
| clearly coolness personified)
| tomohawk wrote:
| It still is.
|
| https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-comment-allegations...
| etskinner wrote:
| The article doesn't really explain: How does equipment + direct
| lines to exchanges = wiretap? Were there backdoors in every
| exchange that allowed people with the right equipment to listen
| in on any subscriber line? If so, couldn't phreaking do the same
| thing?
|
| Also, how did they set up the direct lines all the exchanges?
| greenyoda wrote:
| As I understood it, the backdoors were the "two rogue employees
| of the New York Telephone Company". My guess is that they
| spliced a cable from the apartment into larger underground
| cables that led into the affected phone exchanges, providing a
| number of available wire pairs between the apartment and each
| exchange. (There were probably lots of unused pairs in the
| underground cables to allow for the addition of new phone
| lines.) Then, when the wiretappers wanted to tap a specific
| phone line, the phone company employees would be asked to
| connect one of the wire pairs going into the wiretapper's
| apartment to the victim's wire pair inside the exchange.
| arciini wrote:
| It's fascinating that the article ends with a very pessimistic
| quote, but the implication is clear: wiretapping was immune to
| policy solutions, but technical solutions have been far more
| effective at solving this problem.
|
| > Futility was the order of the day. "Most experts believe that
| no matter what legislation is enacted, the unhappy outlook as of
| now is that wiretapping is here to stay and will increase,"
| Newsweek reported in an article on "The Busy Wiretappers" in the
| spring of 1955. The tumultuous decade that followed proved all of
| the predictions right.
|
| Public-key encryption has brought wiretap-resistant
| communications to the mainstream through the Internet in a way
| that would've been basically impossible to do at scale in the
| analog world.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. Laws can always be ignored or selectively enforced.
| They're worthless paper until something actually happens, and
| it will only happen after the fact, after people's rights have
| been violated.
|
| Technology puts a stop to all that by making it harder if not
| impossible for them to abuse power in the first place.
| echion wrote:
| The flip side is also true: technology enables abuses of
| power to exist faster than the laws can be enforced.
| nathanyz wrote:
| Given the timing of when this happened, I am impressed by the
| scope and scale of it. If these were truly private individuals
| and not related to the 3 letter agencies, then one can only
| imagine what must take place in the world of today.
| fragmede wrote:
| Room 614A is a bit dated by this point, but hopefully gives you
| some idea.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
| nyjah wrote:
| Room 641A. Thank you for sharing the link/story, absolutely
| fascinating.
|
| "641A is a bit dated", has anything more recent come to
| light?
| walrus01 wrote:
| If you want to see something really interesting, there's the
| occasional time when you can see crews working on an open NYC
| Verizon (former NY telephone, then NYNEX) manhole in a street
| hauling out defunct 600 and 1200 pair copper and associated
| splice cases...
|
| Looks like this, but old and decrepit and dirty.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=1200+pair+phone+cable&client...
| [deleted]
| mindslight wrote:
| Back when I was a kid, my grandfather got a hold of some many-
| pair telephone cable. I helped him separate out the individual
| pairs and wind them onto separate spindles. It made fantastic
| wire for electronics (first model trains, later breadboarding),
| given the sheer amount of color combos. I've still got a small
| bit kicking around here and there, but now remembering it
| fondly, I've got to wonder if it would be possible to find some
| more.
| twox2 wrote:
| I remember when my buddy picked up a lineman's headset almost 2
| decades ago and we ran around connecting it to random lines. Good
| times. NYC is one of the best places to grow up as a hacker kid.
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