LebGeeks

samer

Admin

Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

Defense Minister Elias Murr on Monday said a law setting the rules for legal interception of communications to safeguard national security would be applied as of Tuesday "for the first time since independence" in 1943. http://www.naharnet.com/domino/tn/NewsD … enDocument

I kind of find it outrageous. Also, I think terrorists communicate on more secure channels and/or use coded language.

Chris

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

Ya I guess its just more official now, I guess Syrians taught our government a thing or two; that is how to socially, economically and politically repress us. Welcome to 1984 :)

Last edited by Chris (February 2 2009)

battikh

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

wiretapping is not just to intercept organized and "professional" terrorists, it's for all illegal things from the simple tehdideit shakhsiyyeh to the mossad terrorist cells in lebanon who have encryption equipments for communication.
and even for the "coded" language they sometime use, it is usually decoded. they decoded many letters that were sent between members of fat7 el islam. wiretapping DID help in blaming fat7 el islam in some of the bombings. and it can be used not only for the content of the discussion but also to determine who is contacting who at which time, trying to make sure that 2 specific person did contact each others by checking from the voices of the people talking, ... lets say you have Mr X who denied having talked to Mr Y, but you have a saved conversation from him made to a payphone (so you don't know who's the owner of the phone) and from the voice of the other guy you can prove that it IS Mr Y, even if they just say "2 monkeys are dancing in gemayzeh", this is still important proof in an investigation...

and well, it's done in all the developed countries, usa, france, uk, japan, .... there's not a single country in the whole world that doesn't officially and legally wiretap. in your opinion, are france and usa like 1984's lebanon? usa's wiretapping laws are MUCH MUCH worse than ours from a privacy point of view btw...
organizing it and legalizing it is actually a good and better thing. so legalizing it is not actually a going back to 1984. if it is being done with no reason on you, you can complain. they were doing it and you weren't able to do ANYTHING about it. now they're still doing it, but it's organized and legalized in a way that you can complain if it's not justified. so from the way i see it (independantly from the fact that no law is respected in lebanon and that they'll probably wont stick to it), from a legal point of view, it IS an improvement.
saying that legalizing wiretapping is going back and is bad is as saying that legalizing drugs and prostitution is going back. legalizing drugs doesn't mean you support drugs, it's just a way to have a control over it, which is good. and legalizing wiretapping doesn't mean you support it or encourage it, legalizing wiretapping just means that you take some control over it to avoid people abusing it.

going back to 1984 would mean being wiretapped for ANY reason, just coz a guy wants to know if you're sleeping with his wife, which is your private life which is what is made illegal by legalizing wiretapping which is absolutely not a go back to 1984... it IS protecting your privacy. yesterday if you wanted to sleep with a minister's wife, he was able to wiretap you, tomorrow he wont be able to do it from a legal point of view.

the way i see it, the law by itself IS better than what we had, it DOES protect our privacy more than what we had and it IS improvement compared to what we had. the only problem is that it will probably wont be applied or will be abused, specially with our retarded sectarian political system. enno to wiretap you need 1st the approval of either the defense or interior ministers. fine, these two can be, at a certain time, from any religion, any confession, any political side. so 1 year it can be from 1 political side, another year, from another, which is fine, the next minister can review the previous minister's file and all. but then, after this layer you need the approval of the prime minister, which MUST be sunni which means he is most likely to ALWAYS be from the same political side. so basically, from now till our political system changes, any wiretapping MUST be approved by just 1 political side to be done, without his approval, it can't happen which is prone to abuse.

Questions:
-Samer, why do you find this law outrageous?
-Chris, why do you consider it as going back to 1983, specially that what we had from 1983 till the 1st of february 2009 was always the same? enno how is it going back to 1983 if we were already there... this law actually makes thing different from 1983 and from the syrian tutelage era, no? enno as i see it, 1983 till feb 2009, illegal wiretapping of anyone for any reason, and starting of 2nd of feb 2009, attempt to end this, so in your opinion, how is it going back to 1983 and to what syrians taught us?

samer, i assume that if you outraged by this it is because you are against wiretapping and want your privacy to be protected. but ironically, this law is here to protect people's privacy. and btw, this law is not new, it's quiet old, what was decided yesterday was not a "new law to legalize wiretapping", it was a decision to apply the already existing law on wiretapping. wiretapping was always legal, always used, the difference is that now they will apply the law to enforce the conditions to wiretap to protect people's privacy. so you should be happy about their decision to apply this law... here legalizing wiretapping is not for going from "wiretapping is illegal" to "wiretapping is legal", it's from "wiretapping is legal" to "wiretapping is allowed to be done ONLY if it is required and approved"

Last edited by battikh (February 3 2009)

rolf

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

There was wiretapping up to now, but it was dont in unregulated way.

BTW, just tonight i dreamt that in israeli guy i chat with sometimes on msn came to visit me. I showed him around, then we went to my place and he picked up the phone and called someone in israel
I freaked out... and a couple of minutes later i receive a call from the from a guy with a weird arabic accent pretending to be from the cypriot secret service :/

Last edited by rolf (February 3 2009)

Chris

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

@battikh: Erhm... I was referring to 1984, the book.

teodorgeorgiev

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

That is the government staff. As you should know, guys and girls, the body of the government staff is comprised merely of:

1. a pair of big ears.
2. one big ass

Why?

Cause the government staff needs to do only two things:

1. to snoop (eavesdrop)
2. to fart

battikh

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

^^ i think you forgot the hands to take our money

mir

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

and the legs to run away
and the big mouth to tell the lies
and the ...

well, do you have any idea about what systems are installed.. how that stuff works, is there a speech to text recognition... how do they identify the ppl voices, are all the conversations being recorded for further play, for how long ?
you can set your outgoing phone number.. program you pbx to do that no ? how does the tanasot work then

if i worked there i would just record the amount of bad words lebanese say... i think lebanese swear a lot
and do nation stress level studies

rolf

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

will anyone tell me the utility of the international operators? ("eh 3ayne...")

teodorgeorgiev

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

CALEA.
All the telecom equipment is OBLIGED to support CALEA. It is actually a standart, than a protocol or something specific.
The different vendors support CALEA in a different manner. As far as I remember, the Syrian and Lebanese telcos (the fixed lines)
use Siemens EWSD (For Syria I am 100% sure). Can give you as much info as you need here, but it won't help you that much - if they
want to wiretap you, they will do it. For the GSM operators, they mostly use Ericsson AXE as the main switching system - no idea how CALEA is implemented in it.

The police can do the wiretapping remotely. The operator is able to give them a remote interface to the CALEA subsystem so they can
get information in realtime or non-realtime. Used to do it several times whilst maintaining Siemens EWSD and Nextone switches and the procedure is quite simple - they fax you the court order, you open for them access to mess with a particular phone number. According to our law, it is allowed to "monitor" a phone number for as much as 6 months.

Thereis no ASR (automatic speech recognition or so on). They either record the entire CDRs and phone conversations of the "victim", or
just suddenly login and start recording (maybe they get info from outside that the victim is going to place or get a call), or they ask you
to configure for them a trigger.

Voice-recording the entire set of calls that pass through the phone switches is practically impossible due to performance reasons.

Hth

teodorgeorgiev

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

Btw, if someone wants to know how CALEA works (implementation and configuration) in practice, I think it won't be a crime to pass the docs. Contact me off the list. I have info for Nextone, Siemens EWSD and can't remember what else, have to check.

Denys, if you read this, in Russia the equivalent of CALEA is SORM :cool:

rolf

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

Im interested, how do I contact you? pm?

mir

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

Thanks for sharing the info
Sure it would be very interesting to know about the CALEA thing and how it works... But i probably wont' understand most of it, but send to me anyway

CALEA - Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act means that telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment modify and design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that governement have the necessary surveillance capabilities and facilities.. it is the way the networks are set up and hardware used.

do our cell phones come built in with needed tapping features and positionning ? or is it just myths and talks

battikh

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

for positioning, the feature is not needed to be enabled on your cellphone, it can be done with triangulation. the feature doesn't need to be enabled on the cellphone.

as for the tapping thing on your cellphone itself, if you're paranoid or worried, just use open moko or some kind of illegal chinese cellphone
but i don't think there is anything hidden in your cellphone. enno the cellphone is with you, you can open it, check the hardware, ... and for the software, take android for example, it makes it even easier, it's open source so it's quiet easy to check the source code and check if it's doing something behind your back. if cellphones were made to do something behind your back, it would be known publicly as you can easily check both the hardware and software.

rolf

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

Im interested coz i work in a VOIP company.
Im think they have implemented CALEA coz they have a node in Los Angeles, but im not responsible for these systems.
Ill check tomorrow about the equipment they use.

Last edited by rolf (February 4 2009)

Padre

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

i wouldn't be so sure about cell phones
the software is just a small interface for the cell phone. it's mostly done inside the ASIC. and that my freind is closed source (duh ) and has control over the whole phone

teodorgeorgiev

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

Correct (battikh), cellphones do not contain any eavesdropping software. Btw, I am not an expert in wireless communications, merely PSTN, but the process of CALEA for GSM base stations is quite simple. The secret services usually "sniff" at the main switch system (the wire, so to say). As I said - usually the GSM operators use Ericsson AXE as their switching system. It is most comfortable and logical (from technical point of view) to do it at the switching system, not on the "air".

As for the triangulation - I was hired recently for a taxi company to implement such software, where the caller agrees (via a DTMF tone)
for his location coordinates to be passed from the GSM operator to the taxi company facilities, so they should know where to send him
a car (imagine you are in the middle of nowhere and do not know how to explain where you are). The calculation process is made at the
operator level by using BTS data, not from the cellphone at all.

Padre, stop these Big Brother movies and you will have deeper sleep. No one gives a shit about your phone conversations :)

Padre

Member

Re: Legal wiretapping in Lebanon, effective today.

hahaha !! it was a coment made after reading the docs of an old phone that we were modifying