Word: scanners
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...room apartment in downtown Hollywood, where he does his reporting out of a homemade geekatorium: one TV showing CNN, another MSNBC, a third tuned to a direct-broadcast satellite. Rush Limbaugh, a fan and spiritual brother, blares out of one of the radios. Drudge's police scanner is crackling pure L.A. bad will. And of course, there are computers--three of them. They are his two-way pipeline to the Net. In the past 24 hours, 1,796 E-mail messages have poured into his In box--more than usual because of a couple of not entirely flattering stories...
JACKSONVILLE, Florida: When John and Alice Martin picked up Newt Gingrich and John Boehner on their radio scanner last December discussing ethics charges against the Speaker, a violation of his agreement with the ethics committee, they thought they had discovered "a part of history." The price for that discovery may turn out to be $10,000. The Justice Department filed criminal charges Wednesday against the two Democratic Party activists. The Florida couple faces $5,000 each in fines for violating state and federal laws against eavesdropping on phone conversations (Boehner was using a cell phone at the time) and disclosing...
...boom in wireless communications has led to a corresponding boom in wireless snooping. The community of listeners--as people who use scanning equipment to eavesdrop on various wireless devices call themselves--is startlingly large. Bob Grove, publisher of the scanner journal Monitoring Times, puts their number at 10 million to 20 million...
...what about the Martins? The Gingrich case illustrates how difficult privacy laws are to enforce in the wireless era. The 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act made it illegal to divulge intentionally the contents of cell-phone calls, and a 1993 statute outlawed the sale and manufacture of scanners capable of receiving cell-phone signals. But the scanners sold today are easily modified into full-frequency devices. In a press conference last week, the Martins portrayed themselves as hobbyists who accidentally heard the Gingrich call on an ordinary Radio Shack scanner, taped it out of excitement at witnessing history and gave...
...outraged Republicans and a defensive scanner community quickly pointed out, the Martins' story--now the subject of an FBI probe--has a few problems. Only a deliberately modified scanner is likely to have picked up the Gingrich call and held it long enough to produce such a lengthy recording. And only a couple painfully aware of their action's consequences would have passed the tape on to House ethics committee member Jim McDermott accompanied by a letter asking for immunity from prosecution...