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Buggy Bugging Backfires On German Police 289

Posted by timothy from the wer-spricht dept.
Alethes writes "The BBC is reporting that German police have been caught bugging cellphones at the expense of criminal suspects who found a unknown and inaccessible voicemail number listed on their bills that was being used to record calls. Telecommunications authorities said that nearly 20,000 lines were currently being tapped."
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Buggy Bugging Backfires On German Police More

Buggy Bugging Backfires On German Police

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  • hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:14PM (#4610198)
    what's the German translation for "Do'h!"

    • Re:hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)

      by whovian ( 107062 )
      Ach Du D'oh!

    • Re:hmmm... (Score:4, Informative)

      by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbender AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:22PM (#4610304)
      "Nein!" [dusnet.de], according to The Simpsons (German).
      • I was pretty damn sure that nein meant no. When Mr. Burns married Marges mother, the groom side was Barney and an old guy in aWorld War 1 German officer uniform. Barney told him "down in front, and he replied 'NEIN!'".

        • Re:hmmm... (Score:3, Informative)

          by moonbender ( 547943 )
          You're absolutely correct, which just happens to illustrate the fact that in contrast to common belief, The Simpsons is not always correct. It's just that there isn't really a better translation for the "D'oh!" ... "argh", perhabs.

    • Re:hmmm... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dr Caleb ( 121505 )
      what's the German translation for "Do'h!"

      Scheiße - roughly pronounced "Schiess", but I believe "Do'h!" works.

    • Re:hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Havokmon ( 89874 ) <rick@NospAm.havokmon.com> on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:27PM (#4610349) Homepage Journal
      what's the German translation for "Do'h!"

      Remember Wolfenstein?

      Halt!
      Kommentein!
      Aus Pass?
      Vonsaff!
      You panic and run into a wall:
      ###BERRP!###BERRP!###BERRP!###BERRP!###BERRP!

      Ok, so I KNOW the Vonsaff is wrong..

      • Ach! Mein leben! :)

      • Remember Wolfenstein?
        ...

        Or, my personal favorite:

        GUTEN TAG! [BLAM][BLAM][BLAM][BLAM][BLAM][BLAM]

        It's hard to believe that actually scared me at one point in my life, but it did.

    • Re:hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dr. Awktagon ( 233360 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:33PM (#4610421) Homepage

      I believe it's roughly:

      Scheißetwaswirklichschlechtesgeschehenundesüberras chtemichgroß

      Used in a sentence:

      Mein Automobil ist defekt. Scheißetwaswirklichschlechtesgeschehenundesüberras chtemichgroß!!!

      (sorry about slashdot breaking the word in two. They obviously have no respect for the German language.)

      • Re:hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)

        by MacAndrew ( 463832 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:46PM (#4610564) Homepage
        Dontcha think Scheiße pretty much covers it?

        Ah German -- a word for everything. What was the one for "that feeling to get when your neighbor's house is on fire"? Ich vergesse.
        • I suppose ... Schadenfreude? Basically the same feeling CmdrTaco would feel if kuro5hin's server facilities burned down.

        • Re:hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)

          by Lars T. ( 470328 )
          Sankt-Florians-Prinzip (Saint Florian principle): ""Heiliger Sankt Florian, verschon mein Haus, zünd and're an!" - "Holy Saint Florian, spare my house, put others on fire". As in "If it has to happen, let it happen somewhere else".
      • Actually, my favorite is schützengrabenvernichtungspanzerkraftwagen.

        The English translation would be "tank".

        • Re:hmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Pius II. ( 525191 )
          Well, the german translation for "tank" would be "tank" (Nein!) or "Panzer", the exact translation for that long word would be "trench destruction armored force vehicle".
          In the Bundeswehr something like "Schützengrabenvernichtungspanzerkraftwagen" would probably become something like "SGVPKW".
          I can safely assure you that _noone_ ever uses such words in Germany. They are understandable, but they would be incredibly bad style. In fact, every normal german text could probably translated word-by-word (except for the word order) and would be accepted as a perfectly ordinary text by native english speakers; the same goes for english->german translations.
          • In the Bundeswehr something like "Schützengrabenvernichtungspanzerkraftwagen" would probably become something like "SGVPKW".

            Oh, the english military gobblespeak is just as bad. You just don't have the lingual option of just merging the words to form new ones.

            Think of the "highly mobile multipurpose wheeled vehicle". HMMWV. Also called M998. Or just Humvee.

      • Re:hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)

        by Phil Karn ( 14620 )
        Babelfish won't translate this unless you insert some spaces in the German. So I entered

        Scheiß etwas wirklich schlechtesgeschehenundesüberraschtemichgroß

        and got this English translation:

        Shit somewhat really bad-happen-and-surprise-me-largely

  • Oops! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by natron 2.0 ( 615149 )
    How in the hell do you manage to do this? I can understand if it was done by a hacker or novice phone tapper. These guys are supposed to be pros. I guess you could say that their cover is blown. Funny Germans.

    • Re:Oops! (Score:4, Funny)

      by HedRat ( 613308 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @03:12PM (#4610814)
      Funny Germans.

      Indeed. My wife is half German and half Mexican. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I never realized how quickly I'd get tired of sauerkraut tacos.
    • From what I recall from an article about this, the technical details are handled by the phone company, they are required by law to have an infrastructure in place that can forward conversations to the police. The police just show them the paperwork and tell em which lines to tap. Sounds like the phone company involved is going to be in deep sh*t and the police isn't to blame.

  • The news here is (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chris_Stankowitz ( 612232 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:16PM (#4610219)
    that they got caught. German laws allow for this, Sloppy work on the part of either the telecom company or the police (or both). If its one thing American Inteligence ( homebound anyway) is good at is keeping the public unaware of these types of things. Is that a good thing? Thats an agrument for another post.
    • german laws allow making people pay something they don't order? (ie, phonecompany would have to to be able to categorize what it's billing it's customers anyways, how are they going to explain, "you pay 4$ for 'special services'" "-i didn't order any!" "well but mr. klotz from berlin police did".)

  • Headline (Score:2, Interesting)

    by EyesWideOpen ( 198253 )
    This headline is almost good enough to be a contender in the Favorite Past Slashdot Headline.... [slashdot.org] poll!
    Buggy bugging, ha!

  • Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by (H)olyGeekboy ( 595250 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:18PM (#4610238)
    Now they've given Ashcroft an idea to both monitor possible terrorists AND increase revenue for the US govertment...

    Record all of their conversations in voicemails, then charge them for the priviledge. Go Patriot Act! :)

    • Re:Great (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There seem to be a few serious misconceptions in how this article is presented. The first is the idea that the police were "caught" wiretapping innapropriately... if you read the article it appears that the wiretaps were legal, the issue is that these suspects found out they were being tapped because this mystery number suddenly appeared on their bill.


      Misconception numero duo, that the German police were attempting to charge suspects for their being wiretapped. No, if you (once again) read the article it is clear that these suspects being charged on their bills WAS the screwup. Obviously the German Police did not want these potential baddies to get a mystery charge on their cell bills and tip them off to the fact that they were being bugged.


      Finally, it doesn't appear to be, at least completely, the German Police's fault. What happened is, they fiddled their mobbys (the article doesn't spell it all out but by all appearances with an appropriate warrant and the cooperation of the phone company) so that when they made a call it would hook up and record the convo into a voicemail box. The phone company upgraded the phone software and the upgrade was incompatible: the bug made the caller get charged for the hook-up to the voicemail box, and that charge tipped them off that something was fishy. Oops.

    • Better yet, bounce them to 900 numbers or obscure Carribean ones that charge you an arm and a leg before you figure out what's going on.

      After all, these are just terrorists, right?

      I had no idea a cellphone tap was this easy, or this easy to screw up.

  • Free call? (Score:2, Funny)

    by philibob ( 132105 )
    It's listed on their bills... I just hope they weren't charged for it.

  • inaccessable? Can you say war-dialing? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tomhudson ( 43916 ) <barbara.hudson@b ... m ['on.' in gap]> on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:19PM (#4610256) Journal
    Inaccessable? Most voice-mail systems use a 5-digit password. Most of the paswords are simple, such as "1-2-3-4-5" (many detectives from the Montreal Urban Police, for example).

    Hacking most voicemail boxes is so simple because of the simple password.

    Not to mention war-dialing the number trying all possible passwords from a land line.

  • Coming to a town near you (Score:5, Informative)

    by WankersRevenge ( 452399 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:19PM (#4610260)
    Here's a something related to chew on . . . especially after last nights election results.

    "A little-known amendment in the Senate version of the bill makes it much easier for ISPs to disclose e-mail communications without being served with a warrant, which had been prohibited before the Patriot Act of 2001." - wired

    Check it here [wired.com]

  • It is too bad that this did not happen in England. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Prince_Ali ( 614163 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:19PM (#4610269) Journal
    If it had happened in England the subject could have been, "Buggy Bugging Backfires On British Bobbies."
  • no wonder the germans were dumb enough to get caught doing this...i mean, c'mon, they never caught onto the old radio transister in the coffee pot [imdb.com] routine...
  • "The technical fault arose when we were installing new software," a spokesman for the mobile phone company O2 said.

    They should have read that SP3 EULA more carefully.

    "...GIVES US THE RIGHT TO BLOW ALL CURRENT AND FUTURE INVESTIGATIONS"

  • The software errors/stupidity that let the alleged criminals find out they were being tapped, or the fact that we don't have those errors here in the US. Not that I do anything wrong, but I'd still prefer not to be monitored by the government. This reminds me of a /. article a while back about the US taking bids for a central repository of personal information. It may sound like a great idea to the politicians, but after a while they're going to need money, and guess what?... Then everyone's personal information is up for sale. Telcos have been doing this for a while, even my university (UCF) does this, and I get a few dozen porn/marketing spams a day, just because they have my email address in their records. And you thought spam was a problem now....
    • This is something I've been thinking about lately. May sound weird by some, but it should be possible to find out whether you've been bugged (pardon the pun) by the police. Obviously, they won't tell you as long as the investigations are still going, but it would be _very_ interesting to know afterwards.

      A good friend of my mother had been in regular contact with some RAF terrorists back in the '60s or '70s - AFAIK neither my mother nor said friend were actually involved in anything though. If I were in a situation like this I'd be curious to know how much the police has got in their archive about me.
      Anyway, I don't think many people on Slashdot know details about German law, so I guess I'll have to find out myself whether this is possible...

  • Quote... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tyler Eaves ( 344284 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:30PM (#4610384)
    Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb! - Dark Helmet

  • Related News from Finland (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:31PM (#4610394) Journal
    Two senior security staff at Finnish telco Sonera have been remanded in custody, charged with breaching customer privacy by allegedly riffling through private telephone records in an attempt to identify an internal mole

    Read the rest here [theregister.co.uk]. Now, I consider this worse - you can expect policy to breach privacy - but you are not supposed to expect that from a major telco....or...actually...are you?

    • policy

      s/policy/police/

  • A couple of things seem rather odd to me, 1) Why do you need a voicemail to track callers (I do not profess to understand the underlying workings of cell-phone infrastructure). 2) They installed new software that cause the problem, but it really only showed up on the invoicing system? So did the install a new invoicing system? Sounds like they don't have their hacking all that together over there....but just my gut instinct. Maybe someone could shed some greater light on the subject...
    • The voice mailbox was not to track callers, it was to record phone conversations on the phone lines. The billing for the voice mailbox was not supposed to show up at all, but after the software upgrade the owners of the phone lines started being charged for the voice mailboxes that were being used to record their phone conversations, even though they were not actually able to retrieve messages from the mailboxes.

  • If only... (Score:2, Funny)

    by AndroidCat ( 229562 )
    The charge had been listed as a phone sex number, there wouldn't have been a problem.

  • Worth Pointing Out (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:44PM (#4610526)
    This article [bbc.co.uk] from 1998 indicated that Germany has had suspected criminals under surveillance for quite some time. So this shouldn't come as much of a surprise. In fact, it was said that several nations in the EU had similar policies in that article. If that is true, then this isn't a good time to be a civil libertarian. Big Brother is watching quite a few of us.

    Now here's something to think about: These German police who conducted this were up so sloppy that the bugging information showed up on phone bills. So: how many governments are doing this the right way (i.e. without the public's knowledge?)

    • From Pulp Fiction:

      LANCE

      She ain't my fuckin' problem, you fucked her up, you deal with it -- are you talkin' to me on a cellular phone?
      VINCENT
      Sorry.
      LANCE
      I don't know you, who is this, don't come here, I'm hangin' up.

  • Billable wiretaps in New York (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:50PM (#4610600) Homepage
    Something like this happened in the US about a decade ago, in New York, and it's one of the reasons the FBI pushed CALEA through.

    The New York office of the FBI was wiretapping various Mafia types (with some success; they eventually broke the New York Mafia). The taps were done by New York Telephone, and were implemented by ordering a remote extension from the circuit to be tapped to an FBI office. This was a billable service, and it wasn't cheap; the total costs of all those circuits were a strain on the FBI budget.

    One month, the FBI didn't pay the bill for one of their "extensions". The billing software then started billing the other party on the line, the person being wiretapped. Big embarassment.

    This was part of the motivation behind CALEA. Not only did it hurt the investigation, but it embarassed the FBI. (The FBI is very thin-skinned. "Don't embarass the Bureau" started with Hoover and lives on.)

    All this is in one of the books about how the FBI took down the New York Mafia, but I don't have the cite.

  • From Germans to everyone:

    All your calls are belong to us.

  • ironic (Score:3, Funny)

    by zenst ( 558964 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @02:51PM (#4610606) Homepage Journal
    Its funny how in Germany they seem to want to charge the customer were in the UK all the mobile teco's got pissed off with requests for duplicate bill's from the police (which have all call's made and when) that they started charging them.

  • How would the German police respond? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @03:10PM (#4610789)
    Maybe the German police would say something like:

    "Das cellphones ist nicht usen fur trakken das badfolken. Das policen ist nicht snoopen das folken a la 3rd Reich. Relaxen und watchen das bills increasen. And Kwitchurbelliaken."
  • And those awful communist Bad Guys are gone and the Good Guys won. Everything's all better now.

  • But don't worry... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Puk ( 80503 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @03:22PM (#4610922)
    The US government/law enforcement/intelligence agencies would never use their powers to spy on people. Aren't you a PATRIOT?

    -Puk

  • Sounds like the film 'Brazil' (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WolfWithoutAClause ( 162946 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @03:50PM (#4611187) Homepage
    In the film Brazil, after your arrest you have to pay for your own interrogations, your stay in prison and so forth; they send you a bill afterwards for the Governmental services you 'used'; or if you don't survive the interogation, they present the bill to your next of kin.

    Sounds to me like the Germans just sent the bill a bit early; they should have sent it after the investigation was complete.

    1984 came late it seems...

  • To get a mobile telephone in Germany or to start a pay as you go contract, you must show id with an address. This is fakable in Germany particularly if a non-expert is checking it, but difficult.

    On the other hand, once you have a stolen phone, none of the networks there are blocking the phone IMEI numbers. People don't often worry about blocking pay as you go SIM cards, so as long as you keep the card topped up within a certain period the SIM card and the number stays active.

    There is then a pool of numbers and phones that are available to criminals, none of which is traceable to the criminals themselves.

  • User fees are the tendendy, now. Whoever uses a formerly "free" public service now has to shell-out a user-fee. It was only a matter of time before criminals were asked to dip-in...
  • Being a german citizen I see that with a laughing and a weeping eye. Sad thing is that 20.000 phones are tapped. Good thing is the glitch that happened in the accounting software, resulting in having the numbers listed. That is what I call "customer service".

    I just wish you could get this as a feature...

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