What is electronic surveillance, and what are some of its problems?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The following are examples of electronic surveillance tools:
• Telephone tap: An extension hooked into a line at a telephone switching station.
• Transmitter: A minute microphone that can be turned on and off from a remote location using a microwave signal.
• Telephone transmitter: A microphone wired inside a telephone, from which it draws its power. Some devices are activated by an outside telephone call and can transmit voices as well as telephone conversations.
• Laser interceptors: These devices can be pointed at a window to record vibrations on the glass caused by indoor conversations. A computer converts the vibrations into conversations.
• Satellite relays: Microphones transmit by way of a space satellite to a ground receiver.
• Fiber optics: Microsized fiber optic filaments embedded into walls draw power from a building's electrical system and can be used to intercept conversations.
Electronic surveillance has been complicated by technological advances in communications. Conversations via high-capacity digital lines (human voices translated into numbers) and fiber optic lines (using pulses of light), for example, cannot be intercepted using conventional wiretap equipment. Advances in encryption technology allow for communication virtually impossible for eavesdroppers to decipher; they would need access to the code (or an impossible expenditure of time—years). Inexpensive computer programs and hardware can now scramble telephone calls and computer e-mail.
Additional methods for avoiding electronic surveillance have grown in sophistication, such as the use of anonymous remailers. Messages sent over the Internet are received by the remailer, which automatically strips off all traces of the sender's identity and forwards the message to an electronic mailbox (or to other remailers to further bury the identity of the source). Because messages are remailed in random sequence different from the order in which they arrive, anyone monitoring the remailer cannot match outgoing messages with incoming messages to identify who sent which message.