What is a private phone conversation? Does a private conversation occur when you are alone in your home or office, speaking on the phone to someone who is also at home alone? How can you know for sure? The truth is that you can't know. If your conversation is happening over a traditional land line or over the cellular network, there may very well be someone else listening in.
How do I know this? In my 25 years working as a residential and business technician for a major telecommunications carrier I was often times privy to conversations that, according to the people involved in those conversations, I should not have heard. But according to my employer, listening in was ok. It was a part of my job to listen on a phone line. Everyday, I and the people I worked with, would hear conversations of people using the phone system – it was necessary to do this when trying to fix a trouble on a phone line.
As part of my employment I told my employer that I would not divulge any conversation I happened to overhear and neither would I discuss any conversation with any of my fellow workers. And we didn't talk about these conversations. So don't worry.
On the other hand it is possible for anyone, using the same tools that allowed me to listen in, to also tap into a phone line and listen to your conversations. How? The tools are readily available to anyone who knows how to use them, and walk up access (called Access Points) to thousands of phone lines in each of many locations is easily accessed by anyone, throughout any area that has phone service. You just have to know what you are looking for. Security at these Access Points is often just a keyed lock but often, even that isn't present.
Yet, there doesn't seem to be an issue with security on traditional phone lines. Why? The Access Points for areas with a large number of subscribers tend to be in areas where there are many people around during the day. I suppose that for someone who wanted to listen in to a conversation, to stand out in public would risk getting caught. Also, at an Access Point there can be thousands of phone lines passing through. Anyone wanting to listen on a phone line to a certain specific subscriber would have to have the phone company records to know which line to listen on. For someone who really wanted to listen in, that problem is somewhat lessened at a phone terminal at a building - because at a phone terminal at a building there are fewer lines than at an Access Point. Above is a picture of an inside telephone terminal showing a telephone system worker's handset clipped on to one phone line.
At a phone terminal, phone lines for that building terminate and are then connected to the inside wiring for the building. The main security feature of terminals for any building with a large number of telephone subscribers, is that the terminals are often inside the building, usually in a locked room. For smaller buildings and for your home however, the standard policy of the phone company is to put the terminal on the outside of the building. With a terminal outside and only a few phone lines passing through the terminal, we have a major security risk, especially if you are the home owner or business owner.
So, if you are a small business owner, just how do you keep a phone conversation completely private? You could ask your phone company to move the phone terminal on the outside of your building, inside. Of course they would bill you for that service, and still your conversations would not be totally secure end to end; private between you and the person you are talking to.
Alternatively, there are ways of using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and digital encryption to secure a phone conversation end to end. Also, by using phone service from a VoIP provider and the VoIP providers Internet service, you can be pretty sure that no one else is listening in. I'll leave the rest of this story to next month's article where I'll explain why VoIP is more secure than traditional telephone service and actually more secure than cellular service too. Stay tuned!
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