Prevent Phone Monitoring with Digital Spread Spectrum
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
If you are using an analog cordless or cellular telephone, someone is listening to your conversations!
You’ll notice I did not say someone might be listening to your telephone conversations, or there is a possibility that your telephone conversations can be overheard. Simply put, your telephone conversations are being monitored! Radio hobbyists, with their scanners being used as spy equipment, have the capability to listen to telephone conversations and we must assume that a small percentage do from time to time.
Beyond these hobbyists, however, is an underground culture of scanner users who make specific efforts to monitor telephone conversations. This underground culture ranges from individuals
wanting nothing more than to satisfy their personal curiosity, to news reporters lookng for leads, to private eyes gathering information for a case, to criminals listening for credit cards numbers, SSN’s, or other information to be used in the furtherance of a crime. Beyond this, various law enforcement and security agencies may monitor telephones for their own purposes.
But wait, you say–it’s illegal to monitor telephone conversations. It’s even illegal for the police
to do so without a warrant. True, it’s illegal to monitor telephone conversations, but do you really
think that noone’s listening? A law is nothing more than words and, in and of itself, does nothing to prevent that which it proscribes. The chance of getting caught doing phone monitoring are almost nil, and when have you heard of anyone being prosecuted for monitoring a cordless phone?
HOW TO PREVENT IT
One way to prevent monitoring of your telephone conversations is through the use of digital spread spectrum technology. To understand this, we first need to be aware that telephones
are either analog or digital. Analog telephones are nothing more than radio transmitters sending signals between the telephone and the cell site in the case of cellular phones and between the handset and the base plugged in the wall socket in the case of cordless phones.
Any radio scanner can be programmed to receive the cordless
telephone frequencies. Newer scanners have the cellular telephone frequencies block, but these frequencies can be unblocked by anyone with a basic knowledge of radio electronics. Digital telephones are also radio transmitters, but a digital signal is unintelligible when heard on an analog receiver. Of course, a digital receiver would receive a digital telephone signal were it programmed to the appropriate frequency. However, here is where spread spectrum technology comes in.
Spread spectrum was first used during World War II as a method to prevent torpedos being jammed en route to their target.
Digital spread spectrum uses a signal spread over a number of frequencies. These signals are difficult to intercept and demodulate and are resistant to jamming or interference. This provides for a clearer and cleaner telephone signal, as well as preventing monitoring of the signal itself. It is also worth noting that cordless telephones are now available with an operating frequency of 2.4 GHz. Since most scanners do not receive into the gigahertz range, this gives additional
protection against interception and phone monitoring of your telephone signal as it is transmitted between the handset and the base.
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