Editing Wiretapping (section)

===Mobile phone===
The first generation mobile phones ({{circa|1978}} through 1990) could be easily monitored by anyone with a [[Scanner (radio)|'scanning all-band receiver']] because the system used an analog transmission system-like an ordinary radio transmitter. Instead, digital phones are harder to monitor because they use digitally encoded and compressed transmission. However the government can tap mobile phones with the cooperation of the phone company.<ref>{{Cite news |url=https://apnews.com/0538d9746fdd4126b0e700a963f92df4 |title=The price of surveillance: US gov't pays to snoop |last=Flaherty |first=Anne |date=2013-07-10 |work=AP News |access-date=2019-11-03 |publisher=Associated Press |location=Washington}}</ref> It is also possible for organizations with the correct technical equipment to monitor mobile phone communications and decrypt the audio.{{Citation needed|date=March 2019}}

To the mobile phones in its vicinity, a device called an "[[IMSI-catcher]]" pretends to be a legitimate base station of the mobile phone network, thus subjecting the communication between the phone and the network to a [[man-in-the-middle attack]]. This is possible because, while the mobile phone has to authenticate itself to the mobile telephone network, the network does not authenticate itself to the phone.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.networkworld.com/article/2171269/apple-ios-apps-subject-to-man-in-the-middle-attacks.html |title=Apple iOS Apps Subject to Man-in-the-Middle Attacks |last=Messmer |first=Ellen |date=2013-10-29 |website=Network World |access-date=2014-07-22}}</ref>{{Failed verification|date=November 2019}} There is no defense against IMSI-catcher based eavesdropping, except using end-to-end call encryption; products offering this feature, [[secure telephone]]s, are already beginning to appear on the market, though they tend to be expensive and incompatible with each other, which limits their proliferation.<ref>{{Cite thesis |last=Wang |first=Zidu |title=Crypto Phones |date=2007-12-07 |publisher=Ruhr University Bochum |url=http://www.slideshare.net/Garry54/crypto-phones |access-date=2014-07-22}}</ref>