You can hear me now! Cell phone technology: curse or lifesaver?

• Author: Colby, Kent L.

GINGRICH AND HILTON, STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

Ask any passerby with a cell phone in his or her ear what a cell phone, Newt Gingrich and Paris Hilton share in common. Most likely the conversation will turn to security. Cell phone security, that is. A few years back, someone just happened to have a scanner, with a recorder, and Newt happened to drive by right when he was saying the darndest things. Last year, Ms. Hilton's phone, or rather the database, was compromised by a couple of teenyboppers who immediately shared the misbegotten information about her high-roller friends with the world.

There is no evidence that Mr. Gingrich's name was in Hilton's database, nor that Newt was talking about or to Paris. The common sheet in these two separate and unrelated scenarios is that ubiquitous cell phone. The cell phone that has become one of the world's fastest-selling electronic gadgets.

TECHNOLOGY HAS COME A LONG WAY

Odds are when the former Speaker of the House (Gingrich) found his conversation being shared with the world, he was talking on a brick or similar device. It probably transmitted analog in plain old FM, and anyone with an inexpensive police scanner in range of cell phones at the time could have eavesdropped. Lots of voyeurs got their kicks scanning the cell phone frequencies to hear what they could hear. The architects of today's more robust technology make it much more difficult to casually listen in.

Digital phones generally operate at lower power levels than the analog phones of yesteryear and the few remaining today. It is also almost impossible to latch on to a conversation of a phone passing in proximity. The employment of new encryption secures both the phone and the conversation.

Encryption keys rotate between the cell phone and the cell head end equipment. Incidently, cell phone scanners were made illegal by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) several years ago. But, just on the odd chance a person with a scanner finds a channel and the time slice of a cell phone within proximity, they would also have to match the encryption code to decode the signal. The encryption also prevents the cloning of cell phones by encrypting the cell phone number and related information, as well as the voice.

SOMETIMES IT'S THE PEOPLE

After all the hoopla about Paris' escapades that allegedly led up to the compromising of her Who's Who address book, it turned out not to be the device. The young innocent's address book contained not only...