Spycraft - Melton [235]
Cellular telephones are particularly vulnerable to audio attacks. Cellular conversations can be intercepted while transmitting between the nearest cell tower and the handset, or as the signal is relayed between towers to the telephone exchange. All data and conversations sent to and from a cell phone, including e-mails, videos, images, and text messages can be captured without any physical access to the phone itself. Cell phones can be located to within 100 feet by triangulating the signal strength of the cell phone with the three nearest cell towers. By integrating this geographical positioning data with a moving map display, movements of the cell phone can be monitored in near-real time.
A cell phone can also be bugged by gaining access to the instrument for the time required to swap batteries. Modified batteries containing a microphone, digital storage media, and computer chip constitute a self-contained eavesdropping system. Once the audio is captured and stored in compressed format, the microcomputer chip in the system dials a preprogrammed number and burst-transmits the stored information to a receiver. The bug automatically recharges itself when the user charges his cell phone battery.
In the 1980s, cell phones communicated using analog signals that were easily intercepted and monitored. In the 1990s, digital cellular providers began offering limited protection from amateur eavesdroppers, but fell far short of the capabilities and technical resources of intelligence services and law enforcement agencies.
A bugged olive in a martini glass served at a black-tie embassy reception might play well to movie and television audiences but such things are usually unrealistic for CIA operations. To get the “good stuff,” surveillance techs installed listening systems in walls and ceilings of consulates, concealed recorders in attaché cases, and hid microphones and transmitters in apartments. They operated contact microphones to eavesdrop through the walls of hotel rooms, rigged telephones, intercepted cell calls, and bounced laser beams off windowpanes. Whether the techs left cigarette lighters with transmitters in target offices or wired microphones into a case officer’s brassiere, the objective never changed—to get secret intelligence in support of national security.
For each surveillance operation, the techs selected components that work together in order to capture the audio at the target site and transmit it to the listening post. Their equipment differed markedly from the repackaged consumer-grade products masquerading as “covert electronics” and offered for sale at retail spy shops.8 Consumer electronics normally lack the technical sophistication and reliability needed to operate in security environments where covertness is critical and climatic conditions uncontrolled and unpredictable. Compared to professional spy equipment, the consumer “spy” gadgets require excessive power, operate erratically, and emit signals that are easy to detect and intercept.
Many OTS spy electronics were the result of a collaborative development process between CIA engineers and private companies where a dedicated team of cleared contractors worked on Agency projects.9 This model of industry-government cooperation produced components with performances that eclipsed commercial standards by decades. Among the most significant examples were rugged, sensitive audio microphones that were later made public and introduced into hearing aids and small, long-life transmitter batteries that eventually powered heart pacemakers. Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) were used in OTS spy cameras a decade before the same technology was commercially available in digital cameras.
The latest and most sophisticated OTS audio equipment was usually