Greek wiretaps were enabled by embedded spy code
Power, once given, will be abused. And not necessarily by those it’s given to.
Bruce Schenier has a blog entry about the Greek cell phone tapping scandal – about 100 cell phones of politicians and officials, including the American embassy, have been tapped by an unknown party since the 2004 Olympics.
Bruce points out that the “malicious code” used to enable this was actually designed into the system as an eavesdropping mechanism for the police.
“There is an important security lesson here. I have long argued that when you build surveillance mechanisms into communication systems, you invite the bad guys to use those mechanisms for their own purposes. That’s exactly what happened here.”
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/more_on_greek_w.html
Tags: surveillance, greek, wiretapping, security, privacy
