From: ad207@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Brett Kollar)
Newsgroups: alt.radio.scanner
Subject: Cordless
Date: 19 Nov 1992 02:11:08 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
NNTP-Posting-Host: slc10.ins.cwru.edu



THE WALL STREET JOURNAl, Tuesday, November 17, 1992
Reprinted without permission...

By Junda Woo and Jonathan M. Moses

     "Cordless-telephone users, whose conversations 
have been easy prey forelectronic eavesdroppers, 
finally won a degree of privacy in a federal 
appeals-court ruling.
      The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 
criminal case, said that when such phone users 
reasonably expect their conversations to be private, 
the government can't listen in.  But the court said the 
Fourth Amendment privacy right must be evaluated case 
by case, depending on such factors as whether the phone 
user had sought privacy by purchasing devices intended
to foil eavesdroppers or by using phones known to be 
more difficult to tap.
      The ruling is apparently the first in which a 
federal court has allowed cordless phone users any 
privacy rights.  Previously, other appeals courts have 
said the phones are so easy to eavesdrop on - with an 
AM/FM radio or even with another cordless phone - that 
any expectation of privacy was ridiculous.
      The Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 
the late 1980s that eavesdropping was allowed, and the 
U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision.
      The New Orleans court noted that the previous 
opinions are all several years old, and that technology 
has since advanced in the $1.39 billion cordless-phone 
market.  Some phones on store shelves now, for 
instance, come with scrambling devices made to combat 
high-tech eavesdroppers.  Other phones work within 
shorter ranges, so their frequencies can't be as easily
intercepted as they were in the past.  More than 18 
million cordless phones are expected to be sold this 
year, according to Personal Technology Research Inc., a 
Waltham, Mass., market-research and consulting firm.
     'The reasonableness of any expectation of privacy 
for a cordless phone conversation will depend, in large 
part, upon the specific telephone at issue,' the court 
said.  It declined to spell out the technological
features it considered most relevant.
      A three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld 
the drug-trafficking conviction of a Texas man who was 
caught because of cordless-phone conversations that his 
neighbor tapped into and recorded.  The man introduced
no evidence, such as his phone's frequency or range, 
that might show a reasonable expectation of privacy, 
the court said.
      Privacy-rights lawyers applauded the broader 
ruling, which they said is a step toward preventing 
eavesdropping by private citizens as well as police.  
The lawyers noted that cellular-phone conversations 
already are legally protected from eavesdropping, even 
though many cellular phones technically are as easily 
intercepted as cordless ones.
      Cordless phones are treated differently because 
Congress decided in 1986 to write an exception for 
them.  Amateur radio operators lobbied for the 
exclusion because they were afraid they'd be arrested 
for listening to phone conversations that they 
accidentally snagged, said Janlori Goldman, head of the 
privacy and technology project of the American Civil 
Liberties Union.
      But now that cordless phones are more secure, 
they should be treated the same as cellular phone, Ms. 
Goldman said.  'People who use these different kinds of 
phones do not make these kinds of distinctions,' she 
said.  'One circuit is willing to recognize that this 
might be an absurd distinction.' The appeals-court 
decision affects cordless-phone callers in Texas,  
Louisiana and Mississippi and is likely to be cited in 
cases nationwide.
      Wayn R. Lafave, a University of Illinois law 
professor specializing in search-and-seizure issues, 
said, 'I think this makes sense.  The Fourth Amendment 
is not somehow frozen into a posture for all time.'
      But until the appeals court ruling, the nation's 
cordless-phone users have gotten privacy protection 
only from several individual state courts.  A New York 
state appellate court, for instance, ruled in 1990 that 
state law barred the government from intentionally 
listening in on conversations.
      (U.S. vs. David Lee Smith, Fifth U.S. Circuit 
Court of Appeals, New Orleans, 91-5077)
-- 
From: bame@hpfcbig.SDE.HP.COM (Paul Bame)
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 19:56:08 GMT
Subject: Re: Easily Modified?
Organization: HP SESD, Fort Collins, CO