If you’re interested in technology/privacy issues then you probably heard last week’s big news out of the Boston Marathon case. It comes by way of former FBI agent Tim Clemente, who insists that our government routinely records all domestic phone calls.

Clemente’s claim generated lots of healthy skepticism. This isn’t because the project is technically infeasible (the numbers mostly add up), or because there’s no precedent for warrantless wiretapping. To me the most convincing objection was simple: it’d be hard to keep secret.* Mostly for boring phone company reasons.

But this led to another interesting discussion. What if we forget local phone eavesdropping and focus on an ‘easier’ problem: tapping only cellular phone calls.

Cellular eavesdropping seems a lot more tractable, if only because mobile calls are conducted on a broadcast channel. That means you can wiretap with almost no carrier involvement. In fact there’s circumstancial evidence that this already happening — just by different parties than you’d think. According to a new book by reporters Marc Ambinder and Dave Brown Continue reading →