Wiretapgate

I’ve been watching the news about GMA “uncovering” a destabilization plot hatched against her. Supposedly the opposition had wiretapped a mobile phone conversation she had with Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano. In this conversation, GMA is heard to ask the Comelec Commissioner to see what he can do about bringing her winning margin (over FPJ) to 1 million. GMA claims the recording has been doctored, and produced her own copy of the original conversation. She even says that she changed her mobile phone number several times - precisely to avoid being wiretapped.

Here’s what really bothers me. If what she is saying is true, then how in the world did GMA get a hold of a recording of her original conversation with Garcillano? Was she recording all her conversations - ala John F Kennedy? That’s not possible - as she was using a mobile phone. I have yet to see a mobile phone with a built in recorder.

Did she have a device in her office to record all wireless conversations in the vicinity? That’s possible - but the GSM encryption code is very hard to crack, and requires a pretty expensive black box. I’m told the Israeli military has one such device - but it would be pretty absurd for GMA to use it. If she wants to record her conversation, all she has to do is to tell her caller to contact her on the Malacanang landline. It is far easier to record landline conversations.

Did someone in the opposition slip her a copy of the original “unforged” recording? First of all, I seriously doubt that someone plotting against GMA would be so negligent as to not destroy an original “unforged” recording. Secondly, this story in the Inquirer today says that “the Palace claims that it owned the original version of the President’s conversation”.

So where did the President get her recording? An ex-CIA operative once told me that ISAFP has about 30 lines connected to PLDT’s switches. With this, the AFP can listen in on virtually any phone conversation in PLDT’s network. (I have no doubt that ISAFP also has lines to Globe, Digitel, Sun, and all the other carriers). It is important to note that wiretapping today is very different from the way things were in “Mission Impossible”. Nowadays you wiretap with digital devices. It is certainly possible for a device to listen in on various phone conversations simultaneously, and identify the speakers (and then record the conversation). For this to happen, you need to have a huge database of audio recordings of people you wish to monitor. There are algorithms to analyze the frequency spectrum used by each speaker (z-transform, fourier transform, etc). There are algorithms to use this data to fingerprint and later ID the speaker. In fact, some stock brokerages today utilize this software. (eg - if the stock market is crashing and you can’t get through your broker, and automated attendant will ID you then let you enter you stock trade using touch-tone keys. Identification is done by having you say random words that the auto-attendant generates. eg say “five seven three one”.)

So it’s certainly possible for the President to have a device (at ISAFP) that records the conversations of all her “destabilizing elements”. The fact that the Comelec conversation occured over a year ago, indicates that she would also have to maintain archives of all these recordings. The fact that she was able to uncover this plot very early - with enough time to recover this old recording - probably indicates that she’s wiretapping Erap and associates this very minute.

The disk space consumed by such recording isn’t much. 8kbit/sec is enough to get a decent VoIP conversation, so a 2 minute conversation will occupy 120KB. If the average person GMA wants to monitor has 20 conversations/day, then that’s 2.4MB/day or 72MB/month. If she’s monitoring 200 people at any given time, then that’s 14.4Gig of disk space used up per month. It’s certainly doable.

If the recordings didn’t take place at ISAFP, they could also have taken place inside Globe or Smart. (As an aside, I wouldn’t be surprised if both Globe and Smart routinely record conversations of their enemies). While both companies have issued statements about how difficult it is to decrypt a GSM conversation, when they have neglected to tell you is that once the conversation enters their switches, it is no longer encrypted. It is only encrypted when the signal is travelling through the air.

Pretty interesting stuff!

Are there other alternative explanations? The only one i can think of - if she’s not engaging in wiretapping - is that her “original” recording is in fact doctored. It is not the opposition that doctored the recording. It is GMA herself who took the opposition’s recording and created a fake”original”. Either way - it’s pretty diabolical stuff!