On Sat, 6 Aug 2005, Matt Ghali wrote:

...

On Sat, 6 Aug 2005, Joshua Brady wrote:

the FBI can call the NSA anytime they want without a tap order and get them to trigger ECHELON when your voice is apparant on any line.

Not me, I wrapped my cellphone in tin foil.

shiny side out one hopes? Seriously though, I'm not a telco/phone person, but I was once told that the phone switch equipment does the tap 'automagically' to special ds-1 facilities inn LEA-land... which means the cell phone can be wrapped in anything you'd like. If the calls get completed a copy is silently made to the right folks (not the nsa, they aren't LEA).

Sort of. It has to be provisioned like any other service, (that's most of the X.25 portion that people were talking about) but it's a protocol(J-STD) enabled between the carrier and the LEA. It can be DS1, or it could be VPN. The capture is near real time content and data. -M<