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Was anyone else bugged during the 80s

A

Anonymous

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Me and my family were bugged during Thatchers office. My parents were members of the Communist party and the CND but really had little to offer in the way of information.

We heard regular clicks on the line and then one day my dad heard his own voice rewinding and then playing back. Odd cars would sit outside the house and we were followed a couple of times. (at least, we caught them twice)

That was creepy!

So anyone else?
 
Ex-brother-in-law. Similar scenario: clicks on line, tail ends of previous conversations playing back when he picked up the phone.

Thing was, he was only a prospective candidate for the Liberals at the time!!

Shows you how far right the definition of 'left-wing' swung in the 80s.
 
There's an old saying that goes. " Don't say anything on a 'phone that you wouldn't shout from the rooftops."

I think you could reasonably appy that to e-mail and surfing habits too.

I've just had two e-mails from a friend that have taken two days to arrive, even though more recent ones from him have arrived okay. It's not the first time either.

We are the most monitored country on Earth.
 
Many years ago, my family's phone was bugged when my mum worked as a dinner lady at the junior school that Prince Andrew and Prince Edward attended.
We heard clicks and breathing on the line.
I don't remember us being followed, though.

No matter how tenuous your links to Royalty or politics, you will be routinely monitored.
 
I wasn't bugged in the usual sense, but someone found the remote access code for my phone (so they could listen in on anything happening in the vicinity, voice mails, and calls) - and this happened immediately after I started getting involved in remote-viewing :eek:
 
How do you know if you're being bugged? we joke all the time that our phone is bugged, as it often makes a sort of 'Boing' type noise when you pick it up, and theres all sorts of strange noises on the line. one time my wife even heard someone laughing and said 'we can hear you..' we put it down to a 'crossed line' .

We recently got an old cordless phone from my dad. this is constantly 'Beeping' when idle, as if a signal is coming down the wire.

So. Bad line or Surveillance?
 
There's a marvelous story in this week's New Scientist about a bugging fiasco in Germany. The "victims" discovered that there phones were being tapped because it was showing up on their telephone bills and they were being charged for it. :cool:
 
A lecturer of mine (many years ago) was bugged due to his extreme left wing politics. He developed a rather one-sided relationship with the person he claimed running the equipment (I was about to refer to this person as the 'bugger' but realised that this was open to mis-interpretation) whom he referred to as 'Sarge'.

Sadly, 'Sarge' never replied to his cheery questions.

The breathing thing is due to electrical current passing through the line during surveillance. However, I'm sure I read somewhere that modern techniques are pretty much undetectable by the target. Or do MI5 just use very old, cheap technology?
 
haveing recived calls from within parliament im sure ive been recorded!.... in the 80's my mum worked in a canteen in and anonimouse bulding on the outskirts of St Albans... Everything about it was painted grey even the huge barbed wire gates and she was never told what it was they did there...however BT vans passed in and out often along with a fleet of grey vans that went out every morning. Buldings contained grey boxes of recording mechines and no one would say exactly what they did........ hum
 
Never been bugged, to my knowledge, but I used to have letters from Dutch friends regularly opened by Customs & Excise . . .

Carole
 
carole said:
Never been bugged, to my knowledge, but I used to have letters from Dutch friends regularly opened by Customs & Excise . . .

Carole
Click to expand...

that reminds me actuly our friends Irish Johnny sent us a letter (usualy he sends post cards) and it had been opened and badly resealed!... and someone else in Falmouth was shown a picture of Johnny ariveing at his front door... ! this was at a time when Irland was being perticuly troublesome and this person had just aplied for a firearms licence and is a radio enthusiast.....enuf for him to be looked at by speciel branch!....
 
There's an old saying that goes. " Don't say anything on a 'phone that you wouldn't shout from the rooftops."

I think you could reasonably appy that to e-mail and surfing habits too.

...

We are the most monitored country on Earth.
Click to expand...


R.I.P. Bill - our version of the law that the US called 'unconstitutional' until 9/11 when Bush declared it was in the name of national security.
 
Forty2 said:
There's an old saying that goes. " Don't say anything on a 'phone that you wouldn't shout from the rooftops."

I think you could reasonably appy that to e-mail and surfing habits too.
Click to expand...

So that horny fat girl with the webcam was really a spy?

Oh well, she was too good for me anyway.

Look for the uncensored Ogopogo Gone Wild website to turn up in the near future.
 
I was bugged very recently (only weeks ago!) at first i noticed my mail was taking a while to be delivered, and my phoneline would be full of static and be very clicky, i rang BT and they just fobbed me off. my internet connection would cut of because of it, and my ISP say everything was fine. after some investigation i found my phoneline was tapped and all my mail was being read and packages from abroad where being opened.

It was all my fault, with an increase of phonecalls abroad, mainly canada and the US, talking about all types of conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, Al-queada, and iraq. plus phonecalls to people like Micheal moore didnt help my case. but i think the one that swung it was Phone-sex with CALLIOPE:D .
 
mrchopper said:
after some investigation i found my phoneline was tapped and all my mail was being read and packages from abroad where being opened.
Click to expand...
Take us through your investigation.

Are you a phreaker?
 
carole said:
Never been bugged, to my knowledge, but I used to have letters from Dutch friends regularly opened by Customs & Excise . . .

Carole
Click to expand...

I had that exact thing happen. It made me laugh that it was only the Dutch friends where this happened, not letters to other countries! I'm not sure I'd really call the customs letter-opening "bugging," though, as I'm not sure it was targeted at me personally ;)
 
This thread is scary

Is phone tapping really this common in Britain? You guys don't seemed to perturbed. Is it legal?
 
St.Clair said:
Take us through your investigation.

Are you a phreaker?
Click to expand...

Its not as exciting as it sounds! just after 9/11 i saw a documentary about al-queada and there motives behind the attacks, and i wanted to know more. so i posted on the Newsgroups that i was interested in knowing why people are willing to die for what they believe and what not. and i got a reply wich pointed me in the direction of a web site which was run by the national front, and they where selling Al-queada training videos as well as propoganda films from Iraq and north korea so i bought some! i run a small import/export company and all my incoming mail from abroad is opened by customs and exise, and they add duty taxes to it, and these videos where being imported directly to my house. so they must of put two and two together and got 100, they tapped my phoneline and they must of heard my silly calls to mates, talking about conspiracy theories and all sorts of crazy stuff, especially to my friends and family in america i also had two phone calls from Micheal moore who ive beem swapping emails with for the past 12 months or so. anywasy i didnt know about it, i only knew the phoneline had more noise than usuall.

I only found out when i got a letter from the MOD which was very vague as to who it actually came from, saying i was invesigated and nothing was to come of it, they also kindly told me they have every right too and i had no grounds for legal action and it was basically tough shit. it really upset my wife though, i thought it was disturbing but its all in the past now.
 
Jack straw recently made it very legal by highlighting and exploiting a loophole. They are allowed to intercept all Mail, Email, Cell Phones, Land lines and they are allowed to hack into your computer and view your files.

It has occured to me many times that:

A: If they are monitoring me then they are catching me smoking cannabis and watching copied videos. This means that they are actually much more tolerant than the "conspiricist theorists" would have us believe.

B: If they are monitoring people that closely then no-one will be able to get away with the kind of atrocities that I am sure we would all appreciate seeing the back of.

The way I see it......if they are watching me they must be bored and if they are watching the true bad guys then I feel safer.

I am innocent and have nothing to fear.

The trick is to tell yourself that someone is always watching and listening and you will sale through life being one of the good guys.

Who is monitoring the people monitoring us?
 
During the early eighties, my father was working on a classified military project, when BT had an 'open evening' at our local telephone exchange which he took me to.

This was in the days when each phone line had a small meter, from which readings were taken for the phone bills.

Dozens of the meters had small boxes attached to them - my father explained to me that they were bugging devices - he had used them before when he worked at GCHQ.

"watch this" he said, and asked the guide what the boxes were for.

"er, um, oh, er - its just test equipment" said the guide.


I know it isn't conclusive, but i wouldn't be at all suprised if my father was telling the truth - by my recollection, it would suggest that approx 1 in every 1000 lines was bugged.


Since then, my father has described the voice-recognition software that he worked on during the 70s, which was designed to randomly bug lines, covert conversations to text, and the computers would scan the mountains of text for target words and phrases - they never got it operational during his time, but they *were* working on it.

Of course, the intelligence service has admitted that they have listened in on *every* telephone conversation and fax between Britain and the Republic of Ireland for the past 16 years at a discreet office block in the west country.


I don't know what to make of it.
 
I am surprised that only St.Clair has mentioned phreaking, during the late 80's and early 90's some of my friends were really into phreaking. They would often congregate aroung those green "boxes" at the end of peoples streets with a homebrew linesmans handset and a tape recorder. Often in broad daylight, it is amazing what you can get away with if you are dressed in character and are in possetion of a van (dont ask about later "projects"). Please don't lecture me about whether what they were doing was right or wrong as we were all a lot younger then and know better now. They also went through a phase of using a "scanner" to monitor mobile phone calls, they recorded loads of these calls too. even some genuine phone sex!

I would not be surprised if my phone line from work is monitored, I don't work for the MOD but work on an MOD site, we still have to be security cleared and conform to their security regulations. The phone system is a sitewide digital network run from one building so it would be easy to monitor our calls. not that it would be worth monitoring mine, they would just find me guilty of a little phone embezelment as many people are.
 
Slightly OT though,

2 years ago while still living at my parents house I once received a phone call from myself. It was in fact a message I had left on the answering machine of a private person half an hour earlier or so. Pretty creepy. Probably some weird kind of malfunctioning. I have heard of cases when people have heard themselves on the phone. Does anyone know more exactly how/why this stuff happens?
 
This experience is said to be quite common but it is not really a
malfunction. The idea is to let you know that some aspects of your
behaiviour have attracted attention. It presumably ensures that
those with a real agenda encode their statements more carefully and
those who are just playing games get a shot across the bows. :eek:
 
after the gulf war a company "restored " the Quatie phone exchange and its voice recognition and monitoring "trigger word" equipment, that company was BT..
 
After people mentioning Phreaking i thought id dig out the old equiptment for old times sake and see whats out there!!!

I Found 6 Telephone exchanges that are not for public or corpertate use, what other reason could they be there for, some of them BT deny total exhistance of!!!!!! this shows if anyone living in london where to be bugged they would probably be wired through one of the none exhisting ones. (610,612,618).

484 ENGINEER LINES
610 BT DENY THIS EXCHANGE EXISTS - BUT IT DOES!!!!
612 BT DENY THIS EXCHANGE EXISTS - BUT IT DOES!!!!
618 BT DENY THIS EXCHANGES EXISTENCE - AND THERE'S A MODEM ON 1111
811 ENGINEER LINES
926 WHITEHALL

So if BT say these exhcanges just dont exhist, why can i call 618 1111 in london and get a modem? is this is a cover-up for something more sinister?

Now im off to redbox a payphone or something, is playing with the phonelines going to get me into more trouble!
 
Faggus said:
WTF is phreaking?!
Click to expand...

Its a general term for hacking telephone lines, its very naughty but very easy to do, the kids round our way listen in to mobile phone conversations, intercept text messages and phone premium rate numbers for free. i used to do it when i was at uni, i did it to make free phone calls back home, but mates used to listen in on phone sex and stuff. all i did today was look for a telephone exchanges that are not officially there and phoned BT to ask what they where, they denied them being there.
 
For people interested in this I suggest the movie "Enemy of the State" which has a LOT of information about modern wiretapping et al. Also the book Cryptonomicon is a good one for information about conspirasies, govt surveillance and Van Eck phreaking.
 
dunno if you can count it as bugging but i've recently been getting widow boxes appearing asking if i want the microphone on mt computer activated. since it's in a uni computer lab it doesn't have one attached.
could be a lazy hacker.
but i do visit a lot of sites sympathetic to south american freedom fighters/terrorists (depends on who you are) and have sent many emails and text messages saying bush and his lot want shooting
 
mrchopper said:
....
So if BT say these exhcanges just dont exhist, why can i call 618 1111 in london and get a modem? is this is a cover-up for something more sinister?
Click to expand...



Nothing too sinister about this; 618 1111 used to be the number to connect to Prestel. I'd be surprised if this is still in use though...:eek:
 
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