Re: PCS Encryption?

[Steven Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>]

	 Many low-level phone company people don't know from encryption,
	 and consider just being digital to be enough to satisfy their
	 market's demand for privacy :-(  On the other hand, if they're
	 telling the truth that the FBI had somebody's cellphone shut down
	 because they couldn't wiretap it, that's pretty outrageous,
	 and would seem to constitute a "taking".

And an illegal wiretap besides, most likely -- with a warrant, they could
simply put the tap at the base station.  The story may be true, but it
doesn't sound quite right to me.

I recently got a TDMA phone (a Nokia 2160), which is capable of doing
some sort of encryption, though I'm not sure what algorithm.  It doesn't
always encrypt even when in digital mode (it can handle AMPS, too), but
there's a configuration option to tell the user whether or not encryption
is in use.