It seems our power crazy masters have spent a fortune on yet another fiasco. Echelon doesn’t quite come up to spec for those terrorists that are stupid enough to use phones to communicate their dastardly plans. It can’t understand the words if the line isn’t perfect. Unbelievable.
So the real bad guys use technology to bypass Echelon or even go back in time and use couriers etc. while those that can’t afford to just use the cheapest phones they can find and inject some signal noise.
The human brain, still the best computer out there can work around the problem but billions of pounds worth of computer hardware and software are stuck. The fate of the world depends on the quality of the phone lines.
You can’t make this up.
Many, many moons ago, when transistors first became available and I was young, a friend and I developed a way of communicating over the telephone line, a party line, in such a way it was private. It involved such things as a small transistorized tape recorder on which the message was recorded and the played back over the phone line at a greatly increased speed – it was recorded at the other end, had the speed reduced – vola, the message became understandable.
We then progressed to using a frequency reversal circuit which removed the need for mechanical messing about with tape.
Taking what we did then and applying modern digital electronics to it, it should be possible to send complex instructions as background noise to an innocuous conversation with those listening being none the wiser.
Ivan,
Your method would work and hopefully just heard as static providing nobody decided to analyse it. Although with only slightly more sophistication plod would be none the wiser at all.
And we pay good money to be protected as ineffectively as this.
*And we pay good money to be protected as ineffectively as this.*
Lord T,
I think that is the trouble – governments think that if they throw enough money at something then it will be solved.
We have the same thing with scientific thinking as well. Gone are the days when there were a lot of small inventors trying things out – now we have scientific research departments that absorb vast sums of money for very little return. My pet hate on that one is the way NASA cocked up the shuttle program. They have a fixation on exploding totem poles [rockets] when they should have been looking at alternative ways – Virgin space for example. Instead they buried their heads in the past and wonder why they aren’t going anywhere.
(Edited to fix typos)
Governments don’t have any other way of thinking. Spend money or not are their only options.
I’ve commented before about have ordinary people can’t get the tools to innovate now. They are all restricted by Government legislation.
Even in the land of the free.