Category : Science and Education
Archive   : FREQTEXT.ZIP
Filename : CRIMCOMM.TXT

The following was excerpted from the amateur radio network and is placed here
for general interest.

Msg# TSP Size Read To @ BBS From Date Time
501 PN 9661 0 N2AYB AI2Q WB2HBZ 870601 0047
Title: Criminal Communications

From: ka2[email protected] (Chris Crosby) Message-Id: <3352@NN2Z> To: all
Subject: Criminal Communications

> In a recent article Dave Turner writes:
>
> The following is from an editorial in the June, 1987 issue
> of 73 Amateur Radio magazine:
>
> The recent legislation making cellular phone calls illegal to listen in on
> has provided a bonanza for both organized and disorganized crime. It's
> difficult not to laugh over the situation the cellular industry has gotten
> itself into in its blind pursuit of the fast buck.
>
> What's happened is a mass move into cellular by criminals. They buy a
> cellular system, have an unscrupulous dealer alter the electronic serial
> number (ESN) on the built-in programmable IC, which makes calls both
> untraceable and free--a great combo. They tool around town, making calls
> to Pakistan, Columbia, and their Caribbean drug warehouses at will.

I have a few comments to make on this and some related topics which may be of
interest to Net readers. My comments are based upon personal knowledge and
experience as one who has provided some forensic science consulting services
to
certain law enforcement agencies for a number of years.
It's sort of interesting to note that it was even easier to implement spoofing
fraud in dial IMTS mobile telephone installations, but such fraud has been
virtually unheard of. The reasons for this are: much fewer IMTS channels and
much fewer IMTS customers than cellular make such fraud extremely conspicuous;
most IMTS installations are combined with MTS installations and have a high
probability of telephone company (or RCC) operator monitoring.
My personal opinion is that cellular fraud has been encouraged due to "safety
in numbers". 🙂

> Cellular has turned out to be great for coordinating every kind of criminal
> activity. It's just what criminals have been needing for years-- a
> dependable, free, untraceable, and safe communications system. With a
> combination of pagers and cellular phones, crooks are making a shambles
> of the cellular system--all protected by Congress.
>
> If you wanted to deal in drugs, how better to get orders from your
> customers than by giving them your cellular phone number? There's no way
> to tap a telephone that can be anywhere in a big city, operating through
> different cells as it moves around. And with an altered ESN it's all free!

Progress in telecommunications has unquestionably been of benefit to criminal
activity.
Probably the single greatest benefit has been the introduction of call
forwarding. This service has been of such great benefit to the conduct of
unlawful gambling, narcotics and prostitution operations that for many years I
have jokingly referred to it as: "1A Criminal Facilitation Service"; AT&T and
BOC people may appreciate the satire in this remark.
As an example, an unlawful gambling operation could change location every day
or so, with the telephone number for bettors being the same. This situation
also neatly defeats any court-authorized eavesdropping warrant since there
would never be conversations on the telephone pair that was the subject of
such a wiretap; a forwarded call never takes place on the physical line whose
number was dialed. In earlier No. 1 and No 1A ESS installations there was no
rapid method to determine to what number a given line had its calls forwarded;
such determination could only be made by an experienced switchman using the
ESS maintenance tty. This rather frustrated law enforcement agencies in their
investigation of unlawful gambling and narcotics activity. Furthermore, I
know of some instances where telephone company personnel flatly denied to law
enforcement investigators that they could determine the forwarded telephone
number; this was, of course, a false statement, but was made in a misguided
effort to keep the telephone company "uninvolved".

As an interesting aside, prior to the advent of ESS and call forwarding, some
larger unlawful gambling operations used an electronic device called a "cheese
box" that effected a rudimentary kind of call forwarding in a manner similar
to
a loop-around test line. Two telephone lines would be ordered for say, an
unoccupied office or apartment, and each line would connect to the "cheese
box". The actual location of the gambling operation would call the first line,
and remain on the line and wait for calls; the "customers" would call the
second line, with the result that it would auto-answer and be connected to the
first line.
Telephone company loop-around test lines were used for the conduct of unlawful
narcotics dealing during the 1970's, but this practice has generally
disappeared as telephone companies: (1) installed 60A control units or
equivalent devices that dropped loop-around connections upon the detection of
speech energy (legitimate use of loop-around test lines is for single
frequency
transmission measurements only); and (2) went ESS and therefore had "call
trace" capability that would automatically determine the origin of calls to
loop-around and other test lines.
After call forwarding, the next most useful communications adjunct to criminal
activity is the voice radio pager. It is an unfortunate fact of life that no
self-respecting prostitute or "street dealer" of narcotics would be caught
without their voice pager. Voice pagers represent an ideal, inexpensive
method
of arranging clandestine meetings. A typical voice pager scenario: customer
calls narcotics dealer's pager from a coin telephone, giving coin telephone
number;
narcotics dealer finds coin telephone to call coin telephone where customer is
waiting to arrange for a meeting. What could be simpler and more untraceable?
In my travels, I have known of only two instances where criminals used any
speech privacy devices (speech scramblers) to defeat eavesdropping (lawful of
otherwise); however, I suspect that a new generation of low-cost digital
speech
privacy devices will result in more of these devices being used by criminals.
The units that I have seen used were all based upon analog "speech inversion"
techniques; these devices are easy to defeat, whereas the digital devices are
virtually impossible to compromise by other than NSA.
One of the most novel (at the time) applications of communications technology
by criminals that I have personally seen was the use of telecopiers by a large
unlawful gambling operation about 11 years ago. While the law enforcement
agencies involved had obtained eavesdropping warrants to install wiretaps on
some of the telephone lines involved, they were totally baffled by the strange
sounds heard during some intercepted calls. I was called in to solve the
mystery, and some listening told me that this was an FSK facsimile machine
running in 6-minute mode. So we borrowed a telecopier to decode the tapes;
this was not as easy as first anticipated. I finally had to modify the
telecopier to start in receive mode without receiving a ringing signal (which
was not possible from an after-the-fact tape recording). We got some pretty
damning evidence, much to the consternation of the criminals (who suspected a
wiretap, but felt that the facsimile machine was "secure"). While telecopiers
are rather common today, such was not the case 11 years ago. I suspect that
as
telecopiers decrease in price, they too will be more commonly used by
criminals. While Group I and Group II facsimile machines are fairly easy to
monitor, the more common Group III (sub-minute) machines are much more complex
since they are digital and require faking a handshake protocol by any
receiving
machine used as a monitor.

> If it weren't against the law to listen to cellular channels, I'd suggest we
> hams help the law by listening for suspicious cellular calls and recording
)‰ ­Y[— Say, how'd you like to get the goods on some serious crooks and find
> (a) the evidence is inadmissible because it was illegally attained and (b)
> yourself on trial for making the recordings. So join me in a big laugh,
okay?

I know of law enforcement agencies that have in the past used scanners to
listen to paging service channels and IMTS mobile telephone channels, and have
obtained useful intelligence information. None of the information so derived
was used in court per se, but it may have contributed to the "probable cause"
for looking in a certain
_public_ place at a certain time. When any investigator was pressed in court
for the "basis of probable cause", the information was attributed to an
"anonymous informant" - a VERY common source of law enforcement information.
Under the circumstances, I see nothing wrong with this -but I am certain that
a number of people will disagree with me.
For example, an experienced investigator can readily detect a drug deal going
on via certain types of pager messages. Now, if a police cruiser just
happened
to be going by the aforesaid location, and decided it was time for a routine
traffic check... 🙂

[Flames about prosecuting people for alleged "victimless" crimes such as
gambling, narcotics and prostitution should be directed to /dev/null]

<> Larry Lippman @ Recognition Research Corp., Clarence, New York <> UUCP:
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<> FAX: 716/741-9635 {G1,G2,G3 modes} "Have you hugged your cat today?"