Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 22:40:07 GMT
From: bwhitlock@uiuc.edu (Brent Whitlock)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Do Telcos Record the Numbers of Local Calls?
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 13, Issue 45, Message 6 of 7

add@philabs.philips.com (Aninda V. Dasgupta) writes:

> Anyway, what interested me was in this sad, sad story is the fact that
> the phone company keeps logs of all calls made from a pay-phone
> (perhaps all phones?) and calls to a residential phone (again, perhaps
> all phones?)  Moreover, the police (or does it have to be the Feds?)
> can get to the phone logs in a matter of hours.

> [Moderator's Note: Yes, you are correct; very little escapes telco's
> notice these days, and that INHO is good for just such reasons as the
> case you cited.  The telephone should *never* serve as a medium for
> harassement, fraud or the commission of other crimes. The fact that
> the telephone has served these purposes over the years was due to the
> technology in use for many years, not a deliberate thing by telco. The
> development of ESS and the sophisticated ways in which traffic can be
> analyzed and reviewed could be viewed by some twisted logic as an
> 'invasion of privacy' by some people, but I do not view it that way. 

Is it only in large metropolitan areas where all calls to and from
residential and pay phones are logged, or is this the case in the vast
majority of phone systems?  In Urbana, after receiving numerous calls
which hung up when answered over a period of a few weeks, I called the
telephone company to see what could be done about it.  They told me
that they could not find out what number those calls were made from.
They said the telephone system did not work that way.  They could put
a "tap" on the line which would record what numbers calls to our phone
were made from, and they would then match the log created by this tap
with a log that we would keep of when we received these hangup calls,
and then the police would pursue the matter.  This would have cost us
a fee (~ $20.00 ?).  

Our other option was to have our number changed, which they would do
for free if we then made our new number unlisted.  If they had the
capability of looking through their logs to find out where the calls
were originating from, I think that they should have done that.  We
also received several calls for me from some guy that my wife said
sounded like a cowboy, but I was never available when he called, and
he never left a message or called back at the suggested times.  I
would have loved to find out who this guy was and why he was calling
me, as well as if he was the caller who was hanging up or not.  After
a while, the calls stopped on their own.  At the time, our local
telephone system did not have caller ID available, by the way.
Perhaps Caller ID is necessary for the logs to be made.


    * * * * * * --> DISCLAIMER:  I speak only for myself. <-- * * * * * *
Brent Whitlock		Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology
bwhitlock@uiuc.edu	Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
			University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


[Moderator's Note: It is the type of switch being used and the
software it is running rather than the size of the community. If it
can be done one place, it can be done another.   PAT]