When New York City Was a Wiretapper’s Dream | Hacker News Reader

When New York City Was a Wiretapper’s Dream

spectrum.ieee.org

137 pointsbangonkeyboard28 comments

> The midtown Manhattan “wiretap nest” remains one of the largest and most elaborate private eavesdropping operations ever uncovered in the United States.

Wait till you hear about a private eavesdropping[1] operation in Colombia:

"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."

"It cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange'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'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."[2][3]

[1] Though more like meta-data analysis rather than listening to actual conversations.

[2] https://www.mail-archive.com/eristocracy@merrymeet.com/msg00...

[3] https://cocaine.org/cokecrime/index.html

If you want to see something really interesting, there's the occasional time when you can see crews working on an open NYC Verizon (former NY telephone, then NYNEX) manhole in a street hauling out defunct 600 and 1200 pair copper and associated splice cases...

Looks like this, but old and decrepit and dirty.

https://www.google.com/search?q=1200+pair+phone+cable&client...

Back when I was a kid, my grandfather got a hold of some of that many-pair telephone cable. I helped him separate out the individual pairs and wind them onto separate spindles. It made fantastic wire for electronics, given the sheer amount of color combos (first model trains, later breadboarding). I've still got a small bit kicking around here and there, but now remembering it fondly, I've got to wonder if it would be possible to find some more.

When I was in school, this type of wire was all the rage to make bracelets out of because it was "rare". Lot's of phone extension cables were sacrificed once I explained where people could get it. The rarity wore off quick.

Lucky! I had to scavenge them from the exchange boxes after workers visited them. I used to keep an eye out for the workers and return after they'd gone. This was in the late 90s, early aughts, I imagine they don't just leave garbage around like they used to.

If you're ever in Seattle, the telecommunications museum has working mainframes that are still in use in some countries for phone switching.

https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/

How is it possible to track which wire goes to which number? Or does it not matter?

More modern cables have color codes for pairs and sub-bundles within the cable. Older wiring requires a tone generator to identify matching pairs.

wow tone generator sounds really fascinating. the analog/early digital enguiniety and complexity of things like 33 thomas street att building is crazy.

It'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.

> 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.

Public-key encryption has brought wiretap-resistant communications to the mainstream through the Internet in a way that would've been basically impossible to do at scale in the analog world.

Yeah. Laws can always be ignored or selectively enforced. They're worthless paper until something actually happens, and it will only happen after the fact, after people's rights have been violated.

Technology puts a stop to all that by making it harder if not impossible for them to abuse power in the first place.

The flip side is also true: technology enables abuses of power to exist faster than the laws can be enforced.

It's kind of funny and sad how as a result we've come full circle to governments occasionally attempting to effectively legislate in the ability to have 'wiretaps' on internet communications.

I remember when my buddy picked up a lineman's headset almost 2 decades ago and we ran around connecting it to random lines. Good times. NYC is one of the best places to grow up as a hacker kid.

Given the timing of when this happened, I am impressed by the scope and scale of it. If these were truly private individuals and not related to the 3 letter agencies, then one can only imagine what must take place in the world of today.

Room 614A is a bit dated by this point, but hopefully gives you some idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Room 641A. Thank you for sharing the link/story, absolutely fascinating.

"641A is a bit dated", has anything more recent come to light?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures...

Snowden revelations?

At least room 614A was about traffic going through a specific network point. Whereas the more modern "full take" has been about grabbing traffic from pretty much everywhere.

To start, all tele communication providers have to have easy wiretaps built into their systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...

Yes, dating back to the earliest phone systems it was necessary for the operators to listen to a phone line to see if it was busy before connecting (especially in an emergency). And this carried through to the step-by-step switching systems where there was an extra level in each selector bank to allow the technicians to check the status of a line before working on it. It was only necessary for the tech on the test desk to dial a number to be able to monitor it. And of course this monitoring system was "unofficially" connected country wide to the spooks office. And with modern computerised exchanges, this facility is just a few extra lines of code in the software.

NYC was a crazy place with the aftermath of prohibition.

My grandfather owned a bar and was getting shaken down by a sales tax guy, who got paid off to keep the local gangsters aware of the bar’s revenue, etc. A couple of cops busted the crooked tax guy, and ended up thrown through a plate glass window for their troubles.

In short, if anything, “three letter agencies” worked in these shadows at that time unless there was some big operation with hundreds of agents engaged.

Just the other day I was watching the classic Sydney Pollack thriller "The three days of the Condor", with Robert Redford, and I was thinking they treated NY phone lines as extremely accessible. At one point, Condor somehow gains access to an exchange to make a call to his opponents, and proceeds to make his line appear like coming from dozens of different addresses, all with a simple tape recorder.

(it's also funny how in that movie Redford is supposed to be a hippie ubergeek forced to turn into an action hero - when he's clearly coolness personified)

Such a great film. I wonder if the recent TV adaptation was any good. Other fun films that feel like they're in the same vein (or the same universe!):

"Sneakers"

"The Conversation"

"Enemy of the State"

The article doesn't really explain: How does equipment + direct lines to exchanges = wiretap? Were there backdoors in every exchange that allowed people with the right equipment to listen in on any subscriber line? If so, couldn't phreaking do the same thing?

Also, how did they set up the direct lines all the exchanges?

As I understood it, the backdoors were the "two rogue employees of the New York Telephone Company". My guess is that they spliced a cable from the apartment into larger underground cables that led into the affected phone exchanges, providing a number of available wire pairs between the apartment and each exchange. (There were probably lots of unused pairs in the underground cables to allow for the addition of new phone lines.) Then, when the wiretappers wanted to tap a specific phone line, the phone company employees would be asked to connect one of the wire pairs going into the wiretapper's apartment to the victim's wire pair inside the exchange.

Telephone stuff is security by obscurity. The old phone company guys had the shared keys and knew how stuff was wired.

Knowing the lingo and the people, it’s probably pretty trivial to get access and do stuff in those days.

It still is.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-comment-allegations...

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