Report: C-level execs more involved with security

The major data breaches that have received mass media coverage are driving so-called "C-level" executives to become actively involved in their organization's security policies, according to a new report from the (ISC)2.

There are several key "take-aways" from the report, titled "2008 (ISC)2 Global Information Security Workforce" and authored by Rob Ayoub, Frost & Sullivan's network security industry manager.

Ayoub told SCMagazineUS.com that these include the fact that C-level executives are paying attention to security...

"CEOs are asking their security professionals important questions about how they're prepared to not become another TJX," (answers) (more)

Hollywood Wiretap - Is The Pellicano Case New?

Two-bit snoops are a dime a dozen, but Hollywood wiretappers rate a four-bit litereary, literally!
Enough with the alliteration.
Blow 50 cents (not literally) and tap into some deja vu by Brad Lewis. Download Hollywood Wiretap– instantly – from Amazon.com, now.

Lessons in Wiretapping Skills

Los Angeles - The wiretapping trial of Anthony Pellicano, the accused sleuth to the stars and irrepressible eavesdropper, has offered much fodder for celebrity watchers over its two-month run... the trial, which went to the jury last week, offered arguably more for people who enjoy talk of encryption software, code-wiping booby traps or the low-tech secrets of phone company networks.

Here, through various witnesses, are a few of the disclosures:

• Wiretapping is really, really easy. And not just for the government. Anyone sitting in on the Pellicano trial (and staying awake during the telecom testimony) could walk away ready to intercept phone calls after a quick stop at Radio Shack for less than $50 in equipment... For all his wiretapping prowess, however, Mr. Pellicano could not tap cellphones.

• Phone “sweeps” offer false security. There are many companies that offer wiretap detection services. But these services are meant to pick up devices on the premises of the target. If the tap is elsewhere, they are useless...

• The person who programmed Mr. Pellicano’s wiretap software was a college dropout named Kevin Kachikian... His software incorporated an encryption algorithm, Serpent, that the government’s code-breakers have not been able to crack. Serpent, can be downloaded free...

• Mr. Pellicano bragged about his wiretapping ability and vowed that no one on earth would ever learn of it — proving that a code of silence is not too useful if you never stop blabbing about it. (more)

Spy Agency’s Eavesdropping Rose Last Year

S. Korea - The Broadcasting and Communications Commission (BCC) said Thursday that the number of eavesdropping requests from the spy agency and police last year was the highest since 2004, while the number of cases of e-mail monitoring and caller identification also rose.

Telephone companies allowed the National Intelligence Service (NIS), police officials and prosecutors to tap 1,142 phone calls last year, up from 1,062 cases in 2006. Most of the requests were from the NIS, the spy agency.

The number of caller identification requests from investigation authorities also increased by more than 20 percent to 183,659 cases from 150,743, the BCC said. E-mail monitoring rose 28.9 percent to 326 cases.

Furthermore, the actual number of eavesdropping cases can be higher than the released figure since multiple requests on a single case are counted as one, the BCC said. (more)

PIs and Bug Creators Jailed for Industrial Espionage

An Israeli firm of private investigators has been rapped for using spyware to steal sensitive information.

According to reports, four members of the Israeli Modi'in Ezrahi private investigation company have been sentenced after being found guilty of using a Trojan horse to steal commercial information.

The Trojan, which was designed and marketed by London-based couple Michael and Ruth Haephrati, was said to have been used by a number of different private investigation firms to spy on companies including the HOT cable television group and Rani Rahav PR agency.

Another alleged victim was Champion Motors, which imports Audi and Volkswagen vehicles. (more)

A married couple accused of using computer worms to conduct industrial espionage has received jail terms of four and two years after pleading guilty in an Israeli court.

Ruth Brier-Haephrati, 28, and her husband Michael Haephrati, 44, were also ordered to pay damages of two million shekels (£245,000) to their victims. (more)

The Essential Guide to VoIP Privacy

What you need to know about protecting the privacy and confidentiality of IP phone calls.

People generally assume that their private phone calls are just that: private. VoIP users, however, shouldn't take privacy for granted. (neither group should)

The problem with most VoIP calls is that they travel over the Internet, a very public network. This means that calls are vulnerable to snooping at various points throughout their journey. And even private-network VoIP calls can be tapped if access can be gained to the physical wiring.

As a result, business competitors, employees, criminal gangs, tech hobbyists and just plain snoops can all listen in to a business's outgoing and incoming VoIP calls. All that's needed is a packet-sniffing program, easily downloaded from the Internet, and perhaps a tiny piece of hardware to tap into a physical wire undetectably.

But the news isn't all bad. Methods and systems are available to safeguard VoIP traffic... (more)

CBS 46 Investigates: Cell Phone Spying

New cell phone “spyware” has made it easy for just about anyone to bug your phone and uncover details of your private life, communications experts say.

The “spyware," marketed to suspicious spouses, parents and employers, can turn just about any cell phone into a high-tech spying device.

A quick search on the Internet reveals dozens of "spy phone" programs ranging from $4 to $400. Some “spyware” works on Bluetooth technology, while others require a download onto a "smart" phone, like a Blackberry or Web-based device. CBS 46 Investigative Reporter Wendy Saltzman tested Flexispy, high-end software that experts say allows people to eavesdrop on calls, download e-mails, and even track a person's GPS location at the touch of a button. (more) (video) (similar subject, different source)

Court-Approved Wiretapping Rose 14% in '07

Last year might have been a rough year for U.S. home prices, but growth in government wiretaps remained healthy, with the eavesdropping sector posting a 14% increase in court orders compared to 2006.

In 2007, judges approved 4,578 state and federal wiretaps, as compared to 4,015 in 2006, according to two new reports on criminal and intelligence wiretaps.

State investigators are increasingly turning to wiretaps, according to newly released statistics. State police applied for 27% more wiretaps in 2007 than in 2006, with 94% of them targeting cell phones, according to figures released by the U.S. Courts' administrator.

In 2007, state judges approved 1,751 criminal wiretap applications, without turning any of them down, according to the report (.pdf). That's a near-three fold increase in state wiretaps since 1997. (more)

The Headline Evil Word You Can Prevent

April 22, 2008 - "Sanford Hospital tightens security after baby taken"

The good news...
The child was rescued a short time later by a police officer who stopped a Chevy Blazer on Interstate 4 (more)

The bad news...
Most corporations are hedging their bets that the word "after" will not appear in a headline about their security efforts.

In the corporate world, stealing intellectual property is the real-life equivalent of a baby – the corporation's baby. The baby who is to be nurtured into the company's future.

Now is the time to tighten security;
• while it is inexpensive to do,
• while your stockholder good-will is high,
• while you still have a job.

1. Work with your Legal Department to upgrade and keep current: non-disclosure agreements, non-compete contracts, and pro-active programs to detect and deter eavesdropping and espionage.

2. Work with your IT department on: password protection, encryption, wireless LAN security audit and compliance surveys, and employee education.

3. Keep current with intellectual property threats.
Read the news.
Offer the boss proof!
You need funding to prevent eavesdropping and espionage problems.

P.S. Problems do happen...
• Recent Problem #1
• Recent Problem #2
• Recent Problem #3
• Recent Problem #4
• Recent Problem #5
• Recent Problem #6
• Recent Problem #7
• Recent Problem #8
• Recent Problem #9
• Recent Problem #10
And all this was just April's news!

Is it any wonder that this Hot Boardroom Topic was also in April's news?
~Kevin

Wiretap Laws Morph With Technology

Excellent article detailing how legal wiretapping in the United States was forced to grow with technology.

In the old days, everyone was linked to a lug nut... (everyone's telephone) ended up in the basement of the telephone company's switching station. There, the wire emerged, pegged to a rack by a single copper lug nut. Acres of racks lined the walls, each holding rows and columns of lug nuts and their wires, neatly stacked atop each other...

And then it all went sideways.

At the same time that the phone companies were preparing for the transition to digital, the use of cellphones -- which were inherently harder to tap because they used phone lines differently than analog devices -- mushroomed. ...Electronic surveillance, once such a dependable, relatively easy craft, was becoming inordinately difficult. (more)

"...thus proving they could keep a secret, for decades."

Japan - The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' regional information policy office has decided to warn local governments about using analog cordless phones after it was learned that people could listen in on calls with commercially available receivers. (more)

"Relations... have always been based on true friendship and mutual values and interests."

Germany's foreign minister has apologized to his Afghan counterpart for officials' snooping on correspondence between a German reporter and an Afghan government minister, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.

A spokesman at the ministry, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said Frank-Walter Steinmeier telephoned Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta about the wiretapping incident and said those involved had been disciplined and three officials transferred to other duties.

Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmad Baheen confirmed the call had taken place. He said Spanta accepted Steinmeier's apology "and both foreign ministers emphasized the good relations of both countries and both mentioned that this will not affect bilateral relations." (more)

What happens in Vegas...

Las Vegas, NV - Clark County police and prosecutors say they have intercepted more than 29,000 incriminating conversations in 11 years, yet the wiretap recordings usually are hidden -- even years later -- because they are rarely used in open court to prosecute murderers, drug dealers and others.

Now a prominent Las Vegas defense attorney, Dominic Gentile, suggests they are being used, instead, to improperly gather intelligence about alleged crimes for which no wiretap was authorized. Failing to reveal the search results is cheating, he said, because when those other crimes are prosecuted, it denies defense lawyers any chance to examine the wiretap affidavit and question the tap's legality. (more)

Eavesdropping Attempt Made on Porsche Chief

German police have launched a probe after an attempt was made to eavesdrop on Porsche boss Wendelin Wiedeking while he was staying in a luxury hotel.

Security staff from the the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Wolfsburg found a "babyphone" concealed under a sofa in his room, the media reports said, which had been turned on and was transmitting.

Porsche has filed a complaint with the prosecutors' office in Braunschweig, a company spokesperson told the AP news agency on Saturday, April 26.

The news magazines Der Spiegel and Focus said an investigation (a different investigation) is underway after a monitoring device was found in Wiedeking's room at the Ritz-Carlton in Wolfsburg in November. The reports said there was suspicion that the spying attempt took place one day before a meeting on Nov. 16.

Left behind?
The online news site Spiegel Online has reported that hotel security ruled out that a family with a child could have stayed in the suite previously and simply forgotten the device. For several weeks, there was no record of a family having spent an evening in the room.

Porsche told AP that other company officials had also been spied upon, including works council head Uwe Hueck, but did not supply any details. Focus has reported that his telephone conversations at Porsche headquarters in Stuttgart were allegedly wiretapped. It is not known who was behind the action but the company has reportedly notified prosecutors.

Porsche owns 31 percent of shares in Volkswagen, the biggest European automobile manufacturer, and wants to take full control of the firm. Volkswagen has denied any role in espionage, Focus reported. (more)

Update...
Focus reports that the offices of Porsche workers’ organization head Uwe Hück are to be made bug proof after it was discovered that his phone was being tapped. And Der Spiegel says that a bug was found planted in the private flat of former VW chief Wolfgang Bernhard. (more)

Cautionary Tale: Prevention = Cost-Effective

Hannaford spending millions to upgrade after security breach.
Background...
Yet Another Corporate Info-Loss Confession
"But, IT said our data was secure."

Hannaford Bros. Co. said it is spending millions of dollars to enhance the security of its data network following a massive security breach that exposed up to 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers to fraud...

Hannaford President and CEO Ron Hodge apologized again Tuesday to customers for concerns and inconvenience they experienced because of the breach...

In a conference call with reporters, Hodge and Bill Homa, senior vice president and chief information officer, declined to address the cause, scope and nature of the breach, citing the ongoing criminal investigation and pending litigation.

The Hannaford case is among the largest security breaches on record but is much smaller than the tens of millions of credit cards that were exposed at TJX Cos. of Framingham, Mass., which has 2,500 stores and includes the T.J. Maxx and Marshalls chains. (more)

The "millions" figure is likely just a system fix number. The final cost, which will include: public embarrassment, loss of customer good-will and customer ill-will lawsuit losses, can not be tallied just yet.

Recommendation:
Be smart.
Be frugal.
Be a corporate hero.
Spend the bucks to protect your company's communications privacy (voice and data). There is a good chance you will save money in the long run... a lot of money! ~Kevin

Putting the squeeze on Blackberry to get the juice

Talks between Indian officials and Canada's Research In Motion (RIM, the BlackBerry Bunch) would seem not to have gone very smoothly...

The backstory here is that the top brass at India's burgeoning and powerful state security services are concerned that Blackberry's advanced communications technology cannot be breached by their operatives and thus the "authorities" are currently unable to eavesdrop Blackberry users.

They have asked RIM to provide them with the capability to conduct covert surveillance on Blackberry users by requiring the company to install local servers and provide secret back door access to services, but the Canadian vendor has so far refused to comply. (more)

Get the PR team some O2, stat!

UK - O2’s PR team mistakenly connected a journalist of tech website The Register to a call earlier this month, allowing him to eavesdrop on their conversation about his news enquiry.

Turns out, O2 (a UK cellular service provider) reckons The Register’s readers are “techie nerds” and “Muppets” for wanting to move to 3. O2 duly apologised on the website, and said to Mobile News: “Hey, we’re techie nerds ourselves.” (more)

FutureWatch - Eavesdropping on GSM Cell Phones

A web service that will make it easy and inexpensive to crack the GSM A5/1 encryption protocol, quickly enough for a call that is still in progress, is slated to launch at the end of April. Living right at the intersection of open hardware, open source software, software as a service, and cryptography, the service will reduce the cost and effort of cracking GSM call encryption by at least an order of magnitude.

The service is being developed by members of the GSM Software Project and demonstrates just how much things have changed in the world since the GSM system was designed. Various approaches to cracking both A5/1 (the European standard) and A5/2 (the weaker US standard) have been available for some time but this one is unique in that it should be available to researchers and hackers at the end of April in hosted api form instead of pdf.

Back in 1997, this overview of the GSM system declared that "Enciphering is an option for the fairly paranoid, since the signal is already coded, interleaved, and transmitted in a TDMA manner, thus providing protection from all but the most persistent and dedicated eavesdroppers." After all, such a radio encoding scheme made the signals invisible to typical radio band scanners.

Today, however, the availability of the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), an open hardware software defined radio that sells for about $700, combined with work being done at GNU Radio project to codify the GSM waveform (also targeted for the end of this month), makes this once reasonable point of view seem quaint. Good encryption is now a must and it appears that A5 no longer qualifies. (more)

Surveillance Desensitization Continues

Hal Niedzviecki writes...
I ask (Ursula) Lebana how things have changed since she opened Canada’s first spy store back in 1991.

“People who came into the store at that time were quite shocked,” she tells me. “They never realized cameras were that small. They said, ‘Oh my God, that’s scary. And isn’t it terrible to monitor the nanny? Where’s the trust?’”

Sixteen years later, business is booming. “Now people say, ‘Oh, I want a hidden camera,’” says Lebana, who has since opened SpyTech locations in Ottawa and London, Ontario. “They are more willing to use them now. They’re more familiar with it. I’m even getting repeat customers... (more)

Well... sometimes crime pays.

PA - A Pennsylvania state police trooper who claimed a phone conversation with a supervisor was illegally recorded without his permission has been awarded more than $500,000 in damages by a federal jury.

Mario J. Diana was awarded $262,126 in compensatory damages for invasion of privacy and unlawful seizure, and $238,878 in punitive damages against Carmen Altavilla, former commander of Troop P in Wyoming, and Lt. Willard Oliphant. The jury rendered the verdict late Thursday afternoon following a four-day trial before U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo in Wilkes-Barre.

Diana filed suit in 2005, alleging Altavilla ordered Oliphant to tape a phone conversation in which Oliphant advised Diana, who was off on a workers’ compensation claim, that he was being ordered to return to work. (more)

News Flash? "Covert video surveillance becomes widespread in Russian offices"

from Pravda...
"Most of you work in companies equipped with video surveillance systems. As it turns out, video surveillance affects employee’s work more significantly than other control methods (wiretapping, looking through emails and reading the most frequently visited websites)." (more)

"Arrivederci Roma"

"I continue to use the mobile phone with greater freedom, but if there is any news which comes out about my telephone calls being recorded I will leave this country". ~ Silvio Berlusconi, Italian politician, entrepreneur, and media proprietor.

Berlusconi said this when he explained that he had a plan to deal with the indiscriminate use of bugs. "We should only allow the bugging for crimes such as terrorism and organized crime". (more)

From Alligator Clips to Data Rips

The digitization of information has made wiretapping incredibly easy, while at the same time making legislation around warrants and civil liberties exponentially more complex, said experts during an afternoon panel at RSA yesterday.

“Two and a half years ago, me and my partners at the New York Times exposed a national wiretapping program and we still can't tell what it's all about,” said Eric Lichtblau, investigative reporter, who officiated the panel. (more)

"What's in your IT department?"

by Naomi Grossman, bmighty.com
Caught up in the high profile case of Anthony Pellicano -- the detective on trial for racketeering and wiretapping in a case that involves lots of big names in Hollywood -- is the manager of IT security for Conde Nast publications. How exactly did that guy get his job?...

On Gawker, Ryan Tate asks the second most obvious question: "The guy who runs tech security for Condé Nast has admitted lying to the FBI and lending his services to private detective Anthony Pellicano even though he knew Pellicano was tapping people's phones. He's also been accused, in the course of Pellicano's racketeering and wiretap trial, of leaking a pre-publication copy of Vanity Fair that Pellicano mysteriously obtained, and of bragging about bugging the office of his Condé Nast supervisor. So why does he still have a job?"...

...the lessons here go beyond the need to move decisively in hiring and firing. If Reynolds could do that stuff in a huge company like Conde Nast, imagine the damage your IT guy could do in your smaller business -- where there aren't the same resources to weather a disaster. Put the time and effort into checking your IT guys out. Each one could mean the difference between life and death for your company. (more)
Well said!
You've been warned.

India Wants to Eavesdrop on BlackBerrys

BlackBerry users, beware of the snoops. India's Telecommunications Dept. told telecom carriers, Internet service providers, and officials at Research In Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that makes BlackBerrys, that it wants to eavesdrop on transmissions from every BlackBerry phone in the country. To comply, RIM might have to route calls and e-mails through government computer servers based in India. (more)
FutureWatch... Look for other countries to jump on this bandwagon.

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Trinidad & Tobago - Sweeping legislative changes, including a proposal to regulate the practice of wiretapping in the entire region, are among a series of recommendations agreed to by Caricom Heads of States, Bharrat Jagdeo, the Guyanese president, revealed yesterday.

Speaking to reporters outside of the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Trinidad where a special security meeting of the Caricom Heads of Government was concluded. Jagdeo disclosed that he had personal knowledge that wiretapping is done throughout the region and revealed that it was agreed by heads of government that the practice should be regulated by legislation.

“People wiretap now,” he said, “but they can’t use it for evidence because it’s done illegally.” (more)

Bet you never heard of CARICOM.
Guess how many countries we are talking about here...
Full Members
Antigua and Barbuda
Bahamas
Barbados
Belize
Dominica
Grenada
Guyana
Haiti
Jamaica
Montserrat
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Suriname
Trinidad and Tobago
Associate Members
Anguilla
Bermuda
British Virgin Islands
Cayman Islands
Turks and Caicos Islands
Observers
Aruba
Colombia
Dominican Republic
Mexico
Netherlands Antilles
Puerto Rico (U.S.)
Venezuela

That's a lot of wiretappers who will soon be able to present their evidence in court!
It may also change some old saws...
"Sunny places attract shady characters."
may now become...
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Offer of a Murder Surfaces at Wiretap Trial

A hedge fund manager and art collector from New York testified under immunity Tuesday that Anthony Pellicano, the Hollywood private detective accused of wiretapping and racketeering, had once offered to have a movie producer killed for him. (more)

Congressman Ordered to Pay in Wiretap Case

A federal judge has ordered Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) to pay nearly $1.2 million to House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), settling a legal dispute over McDermott's actions in leaking the contents of an intercepted 1996 conference call involving Boehner and other Republican leaders.

Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia,... had already levied a $60,000 civil fine against McDermott in 2004 for violating federal wiretapping statutes by receiving the intercepted audiotape of the conference call and releasing its contents to several members of the media....

Boehner was speaking on a cellphone in Florida, where his conversation was illegally recorded by a couple who heard it on a radio scanner. (more)

Corporate Espionage Arrest - AMX Corp. V.P.

Short version: AMX Corporation's Vice President, David Goldenberg, was "arrested for allegedly participating in corporate espionage practices against a competing manufacturer's representative firm."

The following is from the Bergen County (NJ) Prosecutor's press release...
NJ - Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli announced the arrest of David A. Goldenberg, D.O.B. 05/18/1962, of 432 Golf Dr., Oceanside NY. Goldenberg was arrested on March 28, 2008, on charges of Unlawful Access of a Computer System / Network (2C:20-25b); Unlawful Access of Computer Data / Theft of Data (2C:20-25c); and Conducting an Illegal Wiretap (2A:156A-27)...

The arrest stemmed from an investigation concerning the following: The Paramus Police Department received a complaint from a Paramus based corporation known as Sapphire Marketing, who specializes in high-end audio/visual systems. Representatives of Sapphire reported that they were being suspiciously and consistently underbid for contracts by a competitor for whom David Goldenberg works. They expressed suspicion of corporate espionage. Based on anomalies that the complainant noticed within their computer network and more specifically their electronic mail (e-mail) system, they suspected that the company’s e-mail system had been compromised and that e-mail was being intercepted. The Paramus Police Department (a member of the Computer Crimes Task Force) and the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office Computer Crimes Unit initiated an investigation.

The investigation revealed that Mr. Goldenberg had engineered the passwords protecting several of the complainant’s e-mail accounts. For a period of time, Mr. Goldenberg was intercepting and reading e-mails that related to potential contracts. Mr. Goldenberg then established a free e-mail account that he had control over, and created an automatic forward of the victim’s e-mail so that they would be sent to him directly. This afforded Mr. Goldenberg advanced knowledge of Sapphire’s customers and bid prices, thus further affording him an opportunity to underbid Sapphire. Sapphire Marketing estimates the loss in revenue from Mr. Goldenberg’s actions to exceed one-million dollars. Mr. Goldenberg was arrested without incident on this date. (more) (more - scroll down)

Goldenberg was hired by AMX June 11, 2007...
“David has a proven track record of satisfying the needs of his customers while boosting sales and profitability. He is also an aggressive marketer focused on value creation,” said Rashid Skaf, AMX president and CEO. “David is a dynamic leader who has proven that he can successfully manage and motivate a diverse team of individuals. I am confident that he will fit well into the AMX culture and accomplish great things with our company.” (more)

The Original Hollywood Wiretapper

By Will Vaus
The trial of private detective Anthony Pellicano, who is charged with 110 counts of racketeering, wiretapping, conspiracy and other federal charges, has been capturing headlines for quite some time. No wonder. Its connections to the mob, eavesdropping on Hollywood conversations and the revolving door of movie industry personalities make for a good read. However, for me and my family, it is déjà vu.

Why? Because my father, "Big Jim" Vaus, was the original Hollywood wiretapper. He launched the practice of listening in on the stars in the 1940s and gained the same sort of notoriety then that surrounds Pellicano now. He was written up in the L.A. papers, and his story has been featured in Time, Life, Reader's Digest and in a 1955 movie, "Wiretapper." (more)

Will Vaus, author of My Father Was a Gangster: The Jim Vaus Story

Recordings of Jim Vaus talking about his life.
More stories about Jim Vaus...
The Hollywood Vice Queen (1948)
Wiretapping in Hollywood (1955)
Why Jim Vaus Quit Wiretapping (1946)

Investigative Techniques for the Trial Lawyer - Wiretapping: Part I

...we have probably all wondered if our conversations via phone were being taped.

There are federal and state (all 50 and DC) statutes governing the use of electronic recording equipment. The unlawful use of recording equipment may not only give authority for civil proceedings against the perpetrator of illegal taping, but may also give rise to criminal charges.

Today’s Bulletin gets right into the meat of how and where the taping of private telephone conversations is allowed...

Interesting exceptions to the rules...
In California, generally an all party consent state, one party alone can record if criminal activity (e.g. extortion) is anticipated or involved.

In Arizona, the subscriber to a telephone service can record telephone conversations with no party consent when criminal activity is involved. (more)

Money Talks - Cell Phones Squawk

Spying programs for mobile phones are likely to grow in sophistication and stealth as the business around selling the tools grows, according to a mobile analyst at the Black Hat conference on Friday.

Many of the spy programs on the market are powerful, but aren't very sophisticated code, said Jarno Niemela, a senior antivirus researchers for Finnish security vendor F-Secure, which makes security products for PCs and mobile phones...

One of the latest tools on the market is Mobile SpySuite, which Niemela believes is the first spy tool generator for mobiles. It sells for US$12,500 and would let a hacker custom-build a spy tool aimed at several models of Nokia phones, Niemela said. (more)