Weld Pond sends you.......... "HACKERS SCAN AIRWAVES FOR CONVERSATIONS""Eavesdroppers tap into Private Calls" by Mark Lewyn Aug 14, 1992 Washington Post On the first day of the Soviet coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, Vice President Quayle placed a call to Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.) and assessed the tense, unfolding drama. It turned out not to be a private conversation. At the time, Quayle was aboard a government jet, flying to Washington from California. As he passed over Amarillo, Tex., his conversation, transmitted from the plane to Danforth's phone, was picked up by an eavesdropper using electronic "scanning" gear that searches the airwaves for radio or wireless telephone transmissions and then locks onto them. The conversations contained no state secrets -- the vice president observed that Gorbachev was all but irrelevant and Boris Yeltsin had become the man to watch. But it remains a prized catch among the many conversations overheard over many years by one of a steadily growing fraternity of amateur electronics eavesdroppers who listen in on all sorts of over-the-air transmissions, ranging from Air Force One communications to cordless car-phone talk. One such snoop overheard a March 1990 call placed by Peter Lynch, a well-known mutual fund executive in Boston, discussing his forthcoming resignation, an event that later startled financial circles. Another electronic listener over- see heard the chairman of Popeye's Fried Chicken disclose plans for a 1988 takeover bid for rival Church's Fried Chicken. Calls by President Bush and a number of Cabinet officers have been intercepted. The recording of car-phone calls made by Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder (D), intercepted by a Virginia Beach restaurant owner and shared with Sen. Charles Robb (D-Va.), became a 'cause celebre' in Virginia politics. Any uncoded call that travels via airwaves, rather than wire, can be picked up, thus the possibilities have multiplied steadily with the growth of cellular phones in cars and cordless phones in homes and offices. About 41 percent of U.S. households have cordless phones and the number is expected to grow by nearly 16 million this year, according to the Washington-based Electronics Industry Association. There are 7.5 million cellular telephone subscribers, a technology that passes phone calls over the air through a city from one transmission "cell" to the next. About 1,500 commercial airliners now have air-to-ground phones --roughly half the U.S. fleet. So fast-growing is this new form of electronic hacking that has its own magazines, such as Monitoring Times. "The bulk of the people doing this aren't doing it maliciously," said the magazine's editor, Robert Grove, who said he has been questioned several times by federal agents, curious about the hackers' monitoring activities. But some experts fear the potential for mischief. The threat to businesses from electronic eavesdropping is "substantial," said Thomas S. Birney III, president of Cellular Security Group, a Massachusetts-based consulting group. Air Force One and other military and government aircraft have secure satellite phone links for sensitive conversations with the ground, but because these are expensive to use and sometimes not operating, some calls travel over open frequencies. Specific frequencies, such as those used by the President's plane, are publicly available and are often listed in "scanners" publications and computer bulletin boards. Bush, for example, was accidentally overheard by a newspaper reporter in 1990 while talking about the buildup prior to the Persian Gulf War with Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). The reporter, from the Daily Times in Gloucester, Mass., quickly began taking notes and the next day, quoted Bush in his story under the headline, "Bush Graces City Airspace." The vice president's chief of staff, William Kristol, was overheard castigating one staff aide as a "jerk" for trying to reach him at home. Some eavesdroppers may be stepping over the legal line, particularly if they tape record such conversations. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act prohibits intentional monitoring, taping or distribution of the content of most electronic, wire or private oral communications. Cellular phone calls are explicitly protected under this act. Local laws often also prohibit such activity. However, some lawyers said that under federal law, it is legal to intercept cordless telephone conversations as well as conversations on an open radio channel. The government rarely prosecutes such cases because such eavesdroppers are difficult to catch. Not only that, it is hard to win convictions against "listening Toms," lawyers said, because prosecutors must prove the eavesdropping was intentional. "Unless they prove intent they are not going to win," said Frank Terranella, general counsel for the Association of North American Radio Clubs in Clifton, N.J. "It's a very tough prosecution for them." To help curb eavesdropping, the House has passed a measure sponsored by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House telecommunications and finance subcommittee, that would require the Federal Communications Commission to outlaw any scanner that could receive cellular frequencies. The bill has been sent to the Senate. But there are about 10 million scanners in use, industry experts report, and this year sales of scanners and related equipment such as antennas will top $100 million. Dedicated scanners, who collect the phone calls of high-ranking government officials the way kids collect baseball cards, assemble basements full of electronic gear. In one sense, the electronic eavesdroppers are advanced versions of the ambulance chasers who monitor police and fire calls with simpler scanning equipment and then race to the scene of blazes and accidents for a close look. But they also have a kinship with the computer hackers who toil at breaking into complex computer systems and rummaging around others' files and software programs. One New England eavesdropper has four scanners, each one connected to its own computer, with a variety of scanners, each one connected to its own computer, with a variety of frequencies programmed. When a conversation appears on a pre-selected frequency, a computer automatically locks in on the frequency to capture it. He also keeps a scanner in his car, for entertainment along the road. He justifies his avocation with a seemingly tortured logic. "I'm not going out and stealing these signals." he said. "They're coming into my home, right through my windows." [End of the article. There was no identification of who "Mark Lewyn" is, or who he works for, or his journalistic credentials. The only thing for sure is that he is not a staff writer for the newspaper, since the byline for the paper's own writers is "Washington Post Staff Writer."]