Fungible Convictions

Today had two little highlights. First, Gatsby finally laid still while I had my camera in hand to get a shot of her pornographic belly rub position:

Second, I sat in on one of MIT’s dozens of IAP courses—informal classes held between the fall and spring semesters. The one I went to was on surveillance, mainly telephone wiretapping:

The Bugs in Mr. Bell’s Circuits: Telephone Bugging and Debugging
James M. Atkinson Granite Island Group
Tue Jan 27, 03-06:00pm, 1-190

No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Single session event

The fine art of telephone surveillance and how to detect it, distilled into a two-hour lecture by one of the nation’s top technical counter-surveillance experts. Ever wonder if someone’s listening in on your calls? Maybe that phone on your desk has been turned into a bug that sends your enemies anything you say nearby — regardless of whether you’ve picked up the handset or not. Drawing on 20-odd years’ experience hunting bugs and finding security leaks for governments and major multi-national corporations, Mr. Atkinson will cover both highly rigorous and somewhat more practical ways of frustrating spies and thinking about physical security.

Basically the presentation scared the sh*t out of me, particularly with how easy it is for anyone—a spy, a local cop, a jealous ex, whomever—to tap anything that goes over a wire. James Atkinson was pretty familiar with the MIT campus and its hardware too, so he was able to show a slide with a photo of the very phone I use in my office and show how to bug it so it acts like a microphone, picking up conversations from the room even when the phone itself is hung up. The simplicity of bugging was fascinating though, yet a lot of its success depends on laziness, like phone company workers who don’t lock what they should.

The whole thing made me wish I had understood circuitry better in AP Physics. Circuitry killed my grade.