Coulson Gate - Phone Hacking Happens 24/01/11
Posted by Kevin Box on Mon, Jan 24, 2011 @ 07:03 AM
The only thing that strikes me about the Andy Coulson/Phone 
Tapping Story that is going around at the moment is the naivety of the celebrities and politicians who have had their privacy hacked. There seems to be some kind of assumption that phone calls are private.
Even people who should know better seem to make that assumption. Surely if you are Chancellor of the Exchequer like Gordon Brown or Prime Minister like Tony Blair to make such assumptions is plain daft. It's just begging for trouble. It's kind of like walking away with a radio mike turned on and criticising the party faithful for being bigoted. This could never be.
The reality is that tracing and listening to phone calls is trivial stuff, Private Detectives can do it on demand and for not much money. The Government does it routinely. If you don't believe me - why not take the anthrax test. Simply pick up a phone – landline or mobile and talk to a friend. Now say the word “anthrax” a lot – 8 times seems to be the magic number and enjoy the fact that you have just put yourself on a “list” and that your expensive phone will probably stop working.
A more extreme example is of course, the Chechnyen rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudayev who was killed when a Russian fighter fired two laser guided missiles at him – he was phoning Moscow at the time. You can read the full details here http://www.cloudnetuk.com/blog/bid/36742/Mobile-phone-call-that-killed.
The reason that we still use phones for conversations is that for most of the time the conversations are so banal that no one would ever bother with them. Overhearing people on trains talking about the events of the day is so boring to the none participants that no one bothers. However the greater mortals of this world – Blair and Brown for example presumably have more interesting things to say.
The lessons are clear again. If you want privacy don't use the public phone network (PSTN) – the clue is in the word public.
If you really do want private phone calls then it is possible using encryption point to point. You could for example use an encrypted SIP protocol. However it is not convenient and the fact that you are doing it means you will be noticed. If you are Blair or Brown then you do have access to secure communications and surely you should use them.
The bigger difficulty for me, is not the lack of privacy – it's the opposite, getting noticed. All these celebrities
have cracked that one – they get noticed and then complain about the lack of privacy. Cloudnet has a great product priced at an amazing price point and getting the world to listen is a tough problem. And that's why Google is worth $148bn because they help people like us crack a problem like that.
Written by David Hill, Chairman, Cloudnet
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