How the Greek cellphone network was tapped.

[Perry E. Metzger]

pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) writes:
> I think you're looking at this a bit wrong.  I rememeber the same opinion as
> the above being expressed on the brew-a-stu list about fifteen years ago, and
> no doubt some other list will carry it in another fifteen years time, with
> nothing else having changed.  Anyone who wants secure voice connections
> (governments/military and a vanishingly small number of hardcore geeks)
> already have them, and have had them for years.  Everyone else just doesn't
> care, and probably never will.

I think this is a slight overstatement.

If security on login connections was expensive, difficult, or not part
of the common infrastructure, everyone would still be using plaintext
passwords over telnet. However, ssh is just as easy or in fact easier
to use then telnet/ftp/etc., so that it has become
ubiquitous.

If using secure phones was as cheap and easy as using insecure ones,
everyone would do it. They just won't go out of their way to do
it. The market will happily accept a new feature that is free and
zero complexity in use. It is well within technical possibility to
create such a thing -- the issue is purely political.

Perry

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