<story><title>When New York City Was a Wiretapper’s Dream</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/illegal-wiretapping</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cantrevealname</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The midtown Manhattan “wiretap nest” remains one of the largest and most elaborate private eavesdropping operations ever uncovered in the United States.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wait till you hear about a private eavesdropping[1] operation in Colombia:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;In a 1994 raid, Cali cocaine cartel leader José Santacruz Londono was found to have assembled a database that contained both the office and residential telephone numbers of U.S. diplomats and agents based in Colombia, along with the entire call log for the phone company in Cali, which was leaked by employees of the utility. A $1.5 million IBM AS400 mainframe was loaded with custom-written data-mining software.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange&amp;#x27;s traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials. The computer was essentially conducting a perpetual internal mole-hunt of the cartel&amp;#x27;s organizational chart. Santacruz could see if any of his lieutenants were spilling the beans. A top Colombian narcotics security adviser says the system fingered at least a dozen informants -- and that they were swiftly assassinated by the cartel.&amp;quot;[2][3]&lt;p&gt;[1] Though more like meta-data analysis rather than listening to actual conversations.&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.mail-archive.com&amp;#x2F;eristocracy@merrymeet.com&amp;#x2F;msg00087.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.mail-archive.com&amp;#x2F;eristocracy@merrymeet.com&amp;#x2F;msg00...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cocaine.org&amp;#x2F;cokecrime&amp;#x2F;index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cocaine.org&amp;#x2F;cokecrime&amp;#x2F;index.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>When New York City Was a Wiretapper’s Dream</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/illegal-wiretapping</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>arciini</author><text>It&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;Public-key encryption has brought wiretap-resistant communications to the mainstream through the Internet in a way that would&amp;#x27;ve been basically impossible to do at scale in the analog world.</text></comment>