If you were sorry when you typed the word sorry, then you wouldn't have hit submit. Which necessarily happened after you wrote sorry.

Sorry. . .

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I never considered a cheap $10 radio to be technology inaccessible to a hobo. And such a radio probably would be able to pick up analog signals from older cordless telephones (which is how I was able to use dads old tube based radio to find out that the next door neighbors daughter was a naughty naughty girl...).

However, more modern cordless phones are digital in nature and use DSS frequency hopping to increase range and secure the signal. Espionage agents probably could defeat most off-the-shelf solutions if they could peacefully share the presidential lawn with the hobo, but I gotta think that if the Prez want a cordless phone that the CIA or DOD probably could provide him with a custom one that would do the job...)

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And just because you only have corded phones doesn't mean you're safe from a power outage. I lived at a friend's house for a couple months in between semesters of college, and they had a power outage when I was the only one there. The security system went nuts (naturally), but all his friggen phones were hooked up into a seriously complex phone network (you could listen to the audio from the main TV on the phones in either bathroom, BTW). Guess what? Networks need power, which is exactly what you don't have during a power outage. I couldn't call him to find out the code to make the security system stop reporting a potential break-in to the police (all I had was my personal door entry code, which wasn't any help). Thankfully, he had something rigged up to page him if the power went out, so he showed up after about 20 minutes of ear-piercing alarm noises, but I still had him install a very basic, non-networked phone in one of the kitchen cabinets the next day. I mean, his mom was an insulin-dependant diabetic, and he had a pacemaker since he was a little kid, so not being able to call an ambulance during a power outage was a legitimate concern.

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Seriously? Are you trolling? If not, here's the lowdown...

The first weakness of any secure information system is how easily the information can be intercepted. On a secure, hardwired phone, all lines will be shield against RF leakage. Thus denying potential snoopers means of remote interception by radio. Cordless phones deny that advantage, and give potential snoopers a signal to work with.

The next level of protection is encryption. On a hardwired phone your encryption is not broadcast from your location by RF, meaning it gives snoopers less time to work with the information in progress. A cordless phone may have basic encryption, but bandwidth limitations and computational power limits will necessarily lessen the effective power and security of the device and add additional drain to the onboard battery. A hardwired phone does not have this limitation, as it can run on power both from the phone, from AC power, and from onboard batteries as well, offering multiple levels of redundancy.

Third level of protection is dedicated, uninterrupted lines; Secured, shielded and direct, uninterrupted lines between one location and another. Such lines are in use in secure facilities to prevent tapping at switching locations by means of inserting taps at the wired-pair junctions. Once again, a cordless phone eliminates this level of security by broadcasting its RF signal from the handset to the base before ever reaching the hardline.

However secure the encryption might be on a given cordless handset, the first rule of info-sec is not to let the information get into the snooper's hands in the first place. Barring that possibility, you do the best you can with simple and short radio transmissions using assumed secure encryption. In a secure building there is no excuse not to use a shielded, secured hardline whenever possible.

Lastly, in relation to the article, do you really want the President of the United States to have to switch phones and call back when he's trying to negotiate a peace treaty with a foreign official, because the battery in his cordless handset started to die?

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Anybody want to back me up?

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[www.google.com]

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