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Just a curiousity

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zachtheterrible

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Phone taps . . . say there's one in the phone box in the street. Of course I can't get in there to see if the phone is tapped without cutting the lock.

Wut if I unplugged all of the phones and modems in my house, and then sent a nice surge of high voltage down the line, of course it would destroy the bug, but would it also destroy my portion of the phone box?

I don't plan on this, im just curious :lol:
 
zachtheterrible said:
Phone taps . . . say there's one in the phone box in the street. Of course I can't get in there to see if the phone is tapped without cutting the lock.

Wut if I unplugged all of the phones and modems in my house, and then sent a nice surge of high voltage down the line, of course it would destroy the bug, but would it also destroy my portion of the phone box?

I don't plan on this, im just curious :lol:

It's much more likely to damage phone equipment than the bug, a bug is likelt to be capacitively coupled.
 
The problem with doing that is you might also damage the phone company's electronics at the other end. Since these electronics are specific to you they would know that you are messing with your phone lines - which is quite illegal. The phone comany's circuity is probably designed to withstand lighting and accidental connection to mains power, but there are easier and less illegal ways to defeat a bug.

How about adding loud pseudo-random noise and then subtracting the same noise from the other end? You could set this up with public key encryption over a modem before making the voice connection. All this could be implemented in a small embedded system that plugs between teh phone jack and your phone.
 
thanx for the answer, like i said, i was just curioius :lol:

bmcculla, I would have to have something on my end to make the noise and they would have to have something on their end to subtract the noise, right?
 
Yeah you would both have to have the same device to make the connection.

I think they did something like this in World War 2. The made two recordings of the same radio noise and kept one in the US and sent the other to England. When they wanted to send a recorded message they made a recording with the voice + the radio noise. To decode it the other side would use their record. With pseudo random noise you wouldn't need to send the recording in advance because you could generate the same noise on the fly from the same seed.

The records could only be used once because if you had message A snd message B sent with the same noise recording N: A+N is hard to decode but if you subtract the two encoded messages you get A+N - (B+N) = A-B which is much easier to figure out.
 
The capability to monitor phone calls can be implemented at the exchange level
(listening to public call boxes is something bored pnone company techs used to do)

Of course if paranoia does have a serious hold on you,
there are plenty of good locksmithing sites and forums about. :wink:
 
Thats pretty cool bmcculla. btw, where in california do you live? I think I may have asked you this once before but i forgot :lol:

Yeah tansis, if someone really wants to listen to me (FBI, CIA, IRS, NSA, or some other three letter word) they just call the phone company and tell them to email them a copy of each of my phone calls . . . no privacy.

I'm not paranoid or anything, just curious :lol:
 
I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area - near Berkeley.

VoIP is probably the future of paranoid phone callers. I'd bet encryption is allowed in the standard somewhere - either that or it wouldn't be too hard to add.
 
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