US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[Peter Lemkin]

Remove the battery? Ha those were the days! The iPhone battery is built in. The story has been going round for a long time now that the spooks can turn your phone's microphone on and listen in, even when the phone is switched off. If true, that's quite an astonishing development since every one in the developed world has a mobile phone and most people keep it close to hand, even on the bedside table. Just think, they can tune in and listen to people fuck all over the world. If it's technically possible you can guarantee they would do it, if only as a party trick to entertain new recruits.

That's for sure. They have long been able to listen to voice and the gps location even when you think you have the phone off! I'd not buy a phone one can't take the battery and SIM card out of, if you care about your privacy - especially if you ever plan to make an 'escape' from authorities [in which case you'll need another SIM card not registered to you* and never before used by you!....a whole bunch of them would be best; a new one every day and every few hours if on the 'run'. It seems that they've gotten the major companies to allow both back-door entry and now to build them where one can't remove the battery.....very clever, eh!?...or is that sinister. Elsewhere I mentioned that slightly over 20 years ago I met and interviewed a rouge NSA person who was quite low level - basically a computer tender on the night shift. He told me, among more substantive things, that to entertain themselves, and under the guise to their bosses of making sure the system was working, they would randomly plug into the stream of downloaded conversations - until they found a 'sexy' one, and then they'd tell their buddies how to locate it and listen in too. So, your guess is on the mark...and that was over 20 years ago.

On a slightly different angle...but related....the NSA and like organizations can - besides making/storing illegal and immoral recordings of voice, photos, video, geospatial position, and other data - create out of thin air fake recordings, as I believe they did with many of the 'phone calls' from doomed planes on 9-11-01. And since we now have secret courts and secret trial 'evidence', what is to stop them from presenting faked accounts of who one called, where one was, and what one said and did....etc.

The future doesn't look very rosy [understatement!] unless we stop this monster that has been created - and very quickly. This cancer is about to kill the host, which is already in 'intensive care' and dying.

*As it has been a long times since I lived in my own country and never bought a mobile phone there, I don't know if when one buys a SIM card it is registered as to who bought it. Here, it is not and one can go in and pay cash for a handful of them - even choose the numbers one likes of those available. Unlike in the US, from what I understand, you do not have to register with a company provider, but can just pay as one goes using prepaid cards. I keep an extra SIM card and unregistered mobile [with removable battery] handy, purchased in another part of the planet and not by me....just in case.