I can neither confirm nor deny that I monitored analog cellular, but some calls didn't hop all the much. ;-) Nor can I confirm or deny I heard one of those phone sex service calls, but the conversation lasted long enough for the task to be completed. Um, allegedly. If it ever happened.
Is there a statute of limitation on this stuff?
The timing varied. As I vaguely recall, 30 seconds per channel was about the maximum. Since you've effectively pleaded the 5th amendment, please consider yourself guilty of something. Note that the constitution entitles you to a speedy trial. In this case, the trial was conducted so fast, that you may not have noticed.
Yes: "Statutes of Limitation in Federal Criminal Cases: An Overview" Prosecution is allowed for only as long as the wrong political party is in power. Since monitoring political figures might be construed as something that might be done by a terrorist, there is no expiration date as acts of terrorism are not protected by statutory limitations.
Around 1995 or so, an attorney friend pointed out that it wasn't illegal to listen in on cellular calls, baby monitors, cordless phones, etc. The illegal part was doing something with what you happened to hear.
N/A if it wasn't illegal in the first place.
I lived in 3 states between 1991 and 1997, and in all 3 areas I was able to monitor AMPS calls in their entirety. Frequency hopping apparently arrived (in those areas anyway) sometime later, and then the death of analog after that.
It used to be easy, but see below.
But was the BS audio repeated on the handset channel, the reverse of what you say above? The reason I ask is that as I scanned through the 800MHz band back then, about half of the calls were full duplex, the other half of the calls were just one side of the conversation.
Via the scanner, I didn't detect any delay/echo, which is not to say that the callers experienced the same.
I was commuting between Santa Clara CA and Santa Cruz CA during that time and used Motorola bag phones and flip phones, all with AMPS. When I tried to listen with a scanner, it would hop roughly every 15 seconds. I wasn't aware that there were AMPS systems without frequency hopping until you mentioned it now. I must confess that I didn't listen on cellular calls very often, and may not have noticed any changes in hopping.
No. Both ends should have blocked repeated audio for the simple reason that it's neither necessary or desirable. There were some attempts to use AMPS for dispatch service, where it would be desirable to repeat the base station audio, but I never heard any of those. My guess(tm) is that if the echo canceller kicked in, you heard a one sided conversation. Turn off the echo canceller, and repeated audio might be possible. Still, the delays and echos are difficult to tolerate:
With digital modes, the delays are mostly due to the compression. The more compressed the audio, the longer the delay. However, AMPS did not use any audio compression. Most of the AMPS delays came from transmission delays and echos at the 2 wire to 4 wire transition points. In effect, they have the same problems as an old long distance phone line, with the same solutions being applied (frequency shifting to eliminate feedback, various echo cancellers, and a reliance on side tone over retransmitted audio. I don't know for sure as it's been far too long.
Cellular is blocked in most scanners by the ECPA enacted in 1986 well before the 1997 incident: You're correct that under the 3rd party FCC monitoring rules, you can listen, but not tell anyone.
The illegal part was giving the recording to the politicians which constitutes disclosure. The Martins pleaded guilty and were fined $500 each. The NY Times should also have been fined for publishing a transcript of the conversation, but wasn't.
My reading of 18USC2511 says that it's a crime to intentionally "intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication."
Disclosing the content of such communication is also illegal.
Cellular was indeed blocked in my Radio Shack PRO-2006, but removing the block involved snipping the lead on a single diode, if I remember correctly. It was beyond easy. I still have that scanner around here somewhere, but I haven't used it in years. These days, cellular has gone digital, a lot of police and fire have either gone digital and/or use frequency hopping, and CB scanning is useless with the little dipole antenna, etc. No one uses 900 MHz phones anymore, so that's gone, as well.
The last time I scanned CB, it turned out that I was within range of some woman with a base station who spent hours every day flirting with truckers. My (ex)wife used to listen in while I was at work. I guess it was her equivalent of soap operas. Speaking of duplex, we could hear the woman clearly, but we frequently couldn't hear the truck drivers. That would have required a better antenna.
That's interesting because it sort of indicates that all of the cell calls that I happened to monitor should have been half duplex, but that wasn't the case. I'd say roughly half carried both sides of the conversation.
Back then, I was routinely traveling between specific locations in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana. I don't see any tech leaders in that list, so they may have been using systems that other areas would have considered obsolete?
My memory from 20+ years ago isn't that great. I don't recall ever hearing a conversation that didn't hop, but I may have been mistaken.
Not obsolete, but possibly with some features turned off. A failed frequency hop was a common cause of punching a hole in the conversation, or at worst dropping the call. If that happened, the handset would on the base station control channels, resychronize, and continue where it left off leaving about a 3 second gap in the conversation. Same thing for handoffs between cell sites, which usually involved a channel change. To avoid the problem entirely, some carriers may have turned off frequency hopping.
Disclaimer: I'm guessing here.
I don't know about crappy, but it is user generated. The cell tower nearest to my house is listed as being in the middle of a lake, because that is the aggregate of the reported location of all of the users hitting that tower ... around the lake.
In a city, with lots of folks near the towers, the locations might be more accurate.
What I found is towers, located by their owners in the database. I can see the towers at those locations on Google Maps, but not a clue who is on them. I think deliberately obscured through holding companies.
I recall that tidbit from some locator that I used on my GSM-blackberry, but now that I have a CDMA Android phone, I still don't see it populated.
Could it have been home phones, and not cellular? I remember inadvertently listening to a phone call or two when I was trying to find good channels to listen to on my first scanner, purchased at Quement Electronics, in San Jose, CA. At the time, there probably weren't any cellular phones, and not that many wireless phones in the home.
No, I'm referring to the 800MHz band, analog cellular.
At the time, there were cordless home phones at 900MHz and baby monitors at
49MHz, (or was it 46MHz?), but you wouldn't confuse any of that stuff with cellular.
I tested 3 apps, out of 4 that reputedly do fake cell tower tracking.
None of them, to my knowledge, pop up a warning when/if the tower does something funky, and none leave a log that I know of for you to manually check.
Given that you have to check in real time, they're not all that useful.
But, it's a start.
One of the unpublished concerns I got from the tower dude was a scenario where monitoring analog cellular was done on the 15 freeway (AKA I-15) between LA and Las Vegas. The conversations were very stable in the desert due to flat terrain with widely spaced mountain top towers. Joe Gambler leaves LA for Vegas. Jane Gambler, ridding shotgun, takes out the analog cellular phone and reserves a room in Vegas. Credit card number goes out over the air, intercepted by a hacker.
I can't say that google database every gave me a correct location. Even in remote areas where the towers locations were in the FCC database since they had to license the backhaul.
Possibly it doesn't suck everywhere.
CDMA reporting is no longer done per another post.
The Google Database is acquired from users. It is not gleaned from documents.
It isn't the location of the tower, it is an aggregate of users' phones' GPS location when they are connected to a tower and use Google Location Services, just like the WiFi locations that Google collects.
Out in the wilderness, the locations are going to be way off. I thought in the city they might be close.
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