In the media in several Chinese cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Harbin and Daqing, there have been various reports on the appearance of a kind of detectaphone for mobile phones. According to one report, an employee from the technological department of a mobile phone agency in Guangzhou said: “As far as technology is concerned, the emerge of mobile detectaphone is possible; it depends on how much people know about the terminus details of the mobile network.” He then explained that since it is related to a sort of hi-tech, and most of them are imported from foreign countries, the demand for mobile detectaphone is much larger than the supply. Those potential customers who want to buy one must pay earnest money, which can be as high as 75 percent of the overall price, leaving the rest 25 percent of the cost to be paid when the customer receives the goods after 15 to 20 days. “To guarantee the user's security, the seller will sign an agreement with his or her customer so that no private information will be leaked,” the person added.
Introduction about mobile detectaphone also appears in Internet. It is said that one of this kind of products, named “King of Detectaphone,” is a best buy.
According to the report, with the “King of Detectaphone,” the user can set 10 sets of mobile phone numbers on his or her mobile phone. When any of these numbers is in use, either being called or calling out, the related numbers on both sides will be shown on the screen automatically, while the talk being recorded in detail. The customer can retrieve the conversation and replay the audio recording at anytime. A producer of the mobile detectaphone said that as long as the customer inputs a mobile phone number, all calls from or to this number can be detected wherever in the world they are made.
With great curiosity, reporter who wrote the article decided to try this new hi-tech device of mobile detectaphone. He input his own mobile phone number and ran downstairs from the 9th floor to the 1st floor of the building to make a phone call to his friend. After a few minutes, he came back to the detectaphone holder to see the result. To his surprise, the detectaphone had recorded his conversation with his friend completely and there was not a single mistake when he replayed the recording.
However, head of the market department of Liaoning Mobile (a branch of China Mobile Communications Corporation in Liaoning Province) said that his company had sent experts to Guangdong to investigate the case of mobile detectaphones, but found nothing could be called a mobile detectaphone in the mobile phone markets in the province.
China Mobile denies the existence of detectaphone. Meanwhile China Unicom has not yet expressed its attitude towards the appearance of this new product. A report entitled "China Unicom Says CDMA Network Is Safe While Detectaphone Causes Mobile Phone Panic" was published in a Beijing local newspaper. According to this report, it is true that some illegal dealers are secretly selling mobile detectaphones, which are claimed to be able to eavesdrop others' mobile phone talks. There are mainly two kinds of technological methods to eavesdrop mobile phones: one is to set eavesdropping chips in mobile phones; another is to capture mobile phone signals in the air. China Unicom, however, has found another advantage of its CDMA network, which is technically safe, making it impossible for people to eavesdrop others' phone calls on the network.
Can mobile phone calls be wiretapped?
At present, the number of advertisements of detectaphone equipment has decreased, but the concern for the matter in the media is rising. Experts from Beijing and other places warned that people should pay attention to communication safety. If equipment such as mobile detectaphone appears in the market, they say, it would cause problems relating to morality and law. But it remains a major concern of the massive mobile phone users: can mobile phone calls be wiretapped or not?
As the information of the mobile phone wiretapping first came from an interview carried in a medium publication in the end of last year, Liaoning Mobile holds that it is a "negative teaching material."
An expert with Liaoning Mobile said that the author of the article is a non-professional. The basic fact is that except for some remote areas, which need to use a satellite to help relay the signals in transmission, most other areas in China use fixed circuits for signal transmission (optical cable, PCM, etc). The communication technology mentioned in the article so far hasn't been used in China.
As to the abundant examples the said article uses to support the view that mobile phone can be wiretapped, including the anniversary celebration of Petersburg's foundation for 300 years, the Russian government's wiretapping of the explosion happened in a Moscow concert in July, the Liaoning Mobile expert explained that if those were true, the wiretapping could have been taken out only in the situation that the Russian government had closed the GSM network's coding mechanism in advance; otherwise, even the government can't wiretap any mobile phone.
The expert from Liaoning Mobile added that 80 percent of mobile phone users in the world are using GSM network, and China Mobile uses the most advanced encrypt technology to protect communication safety. By now, nobody is able to crack the encrypt method.
(China.org.cn by Wang Sining December 20, 2003)
