How protected is your privacy?

Illegal wiretapping takes place everywhere where there are telecommunication systems - whether they are fixed, mobile or VoIP-based. The history of wiretapping began in the 1890s with the invention of the telephone recorder. And if amateur wiretappers mostly use crude and detectable methods, then governments and law-enforcement agencies operate from a different level - they have a law-granted access to the central switching equipment in the phone system and to the base stations that relay cell-phone calls, which lets them eavesdrop on wireless communication as well. On top of that is industrial espionage where state-of -the-art technologies are used for spying, stealing of business secrets and wiretapping.

Practically every country's legislation requires telecommunication operators to provide lawful interception (wiretapping) to law enforcement authorities. Forced or covered by the state or society security requirements are getting intercepted and eventually wiretapped millions and millions of conversations.

A closer look at political affairs shows that the majority of the world's countries face illegal wiretapping scandals, especially involving high-ranking political figures. With an enviable regularity various incidents of illegal wiretapping appear in different countries. Read the following compilation of news.

Columbia, 2007: "President Alvaro Uribe faced a new scandal Tuesday over alleged wiretapping of political opponents and journalists, one day after he ordered the arrest of 19 present and former Colombian officials accused of signing a "devil's pact" with right-wing paramilitaries. In a news conference Tuesday, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos disclosed that the administration had uncovered a broad and systematic practice by the national police of wiretapping prominent public figures, including members of Uribe's government."

Russia, 2007: A headline in Komsomolskaja Pravda says: "High-ranking policemen were caught at illegal interception and wiretapping of Moscow's politicians' and businesspersons' phones. Wiretapped conversations were sold on demand."

Italy, 2006: "Telecom Italia, one of the major electronic communications providers in Italy, is in the middle of a huge scandal regarding the illegal wiretapping and surveillance of the telephone networks. " says the electronic journal of the European Digital Rights. "According to Telecom Italia's own investigation, their procedure and machines used for the legal wiretaps had a number of flaws and it was technically possible to spy on the telephone conversations, without leaving any trace."

Greece, 2006: The Athens Affair : We now know that the illegally implanted software, which was eventually found in a total of four of Vodafone's Greek switches, created parallel streams of digitized voice for the tapped phone calls. One stream was the ordinary one, between the two calling parties. The other stream, an exact copy, was directed to other cellphones, allowing the tappers to listen in on the conversations on the cellphones, and probably also to record them. The software also routed location and other information about those phone calls to these shadow handsets via automated text messages.

USA, 2006, Los Angeles: A federal investigation reveals the tactics of dozens of Los Angeles attorneys, who represented over the years more than a hundred directors, producers, and movie stars, from Steven Spielberg, Nicole Kidman, and Stevie Wonder to Chris Rock, Kevin Costner, and Demi Moore. A wide swath of Hollywood's legal and entertainment establishments is living in abject fear. For the last 20 years when things got nasty, L.A. lawyers turned to Anthony Pellicano, who monitored, investigated, intimidated, and in some cases wiretapped their opponents. The billionaire financier Kirk Kerkorian's longtime attorney, Terry Christensen, became the first high-profile L.A. lawyer to be indicted, for allegedly paying Pellicano $100,000 to tap the phones of Kerkorian's ex-wife, Lisa Bonder.

South Korea, 2005: The nation's spy agents were found to have expanded their eavesdropping of telephone conversations by nearly four times during the last three years, intensifying public anxiety toward possible bugging of their private conversations. For the purpose of "investigations," the National Intelligence Service increased the number of wiretapping cases of telephone conversations from 2,234 in 2002 to 8,201 in 2004, the Ministry of Information and Communication reported to the National Assembly yesterday. (read source)

Mexico, 2003: Just about everyone in Mexican politics professed to be shocked recently when a powerful opposition congresswoman was caught on tape calling one of her rivals a bloodsucker and scheming against her party's leader. Not that anyone was surprised by the evidence that Elba Esther Gordillo can be a ruthless operator who swears like a sailor. Or by the move to embarrass her by tapping and leaking 42 of her phone conversations to Mexican newspapers, which excerpted them last month with no expletives deleted. The same week Gordillo's loose tongue made headlines, and so did the wiretapping of Felipe Ramos Rizo, the country's best-known soccer referee. What he said on the phone has not been made public, but the recordings ended up in the hands of a Mexican soccer official - apparently as ammunition in a dispute over alleged bribe-taking - and led to the referee's two-month suspension from work." (read source)

Macedonia, 2001: Macedonian Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski demanded that parliament set up a commission on Thursday to investigate opposition accusations of wiretapping in a scandal that has been dubbed the "Macedonian Watergate." The commission would investigate recent accusations that the ruling coalition's leading party was listening in to the phone calls of Macedonia's top officials, including some of the coalition's own members, members of parliament and journalists. The head of the Social Democratic Alliance of Macedonia (SDSM), Branko Crvenkovski, leveled the accusations against the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization - Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE), at a news conference on Wednesday. During the conference, he provided transcripts of some wiretapped conversations. (read source)

Brazil, 1998. Several major government officials including the communications minister, president of Brazilian Development Bank, Foreign Trade Council's head, and Banco do Brasil's international affairs director have resigned following the publication of illegally tapped conversations of the communications minister showing undue government interference with telecom privatizations. (Associated Press)

Peru, 1998: A former agent in Peru's military intelligence has said illegal phone tapping was carried out to monitor leading politicians and journalists. (read source)

France, 1996: "The French Socialist Party suffered a resounding defeat in parliamentary elections on March 21 and 28 in part due to a wiretapping scandal that broke a week before the elections. [...] The scandal emerged after reports and transcripts were leaked to the Parisian daily paper Liberation that a special counter-intelligence group directly responsible to President Mitterrand illegally wiretapped numerous people during the 80s. [...] More recently, author Peter Schweizer reported in his book Friendly Spies that the French government regularly wiretaps conversations of foreign companies for industrial information which is then passed onto French companies.."

Turkey, 1996: "special wiretapping devices placed in a room on the eighth floor of the Ankara Police Department had been used to wiretap then-prime minister Bulent Ecevit, then-chief of general staff gen. Huseyin Kivrikoglu and opposition leaders. When this wiretapping scandal was revealed, Tantan, the interior minister of the time, relieved 11 officials of duty, including Police Department Intelligence Bureau's director Sabri Uzun, Ankara police chief Cevdet Saral, Ankara deputy police chief Osman Ak, intelligence chief Ersan Dalmaz and deputy intelligence chief Zafer Aktas." (read source)

"There's no way an ordinary citizen can tell for sure whether anyone is listening in on his telephone line. Most people think that clicks and fading tip them off if wiretappers are at work. That's an old wives' tale. A properly installed tap gives no clue whatsoever to its presence. Moreover, an expert electronic eavesdropper can filter out all extraneous noise in the recordings of a conversation." (read source)

Even if you're not a politician, famous actor, athlete or any kind of showbiz person the threat of being spied on is still high enough. In fact, anyone who possesses confidential information is a fine target for a wiretap, so only extra attention to your privacy will protect you from someone dropping a bombshell.