I apologize in advance if I sound snarky, but I’m really fucking pissed off and I need some answers!
I have a V-Tech cordless telephone that is 3.2 gigs and digital spread spectrum. This technology is supposed to be immune to people eavesdropping using scanners and such.
Tonight something happened in my neighborhood and I first called the local police, and then called the department I work for and told them I was putting myself on-duty.
About 30 seconds later my neighbor came over and said he heard my telephone conversion on his baby monitor and wanted to know what the problem was!
His baby monitor? What the fuck!?!:mad:
In the old days listening to cordless telephone conversations on a baby monitor or police scanner was common, and actually legal.
I am well aware of the weaknesses of cordless phones which is why I was very careful when I picked out this particular model.
I advised the neighbor that we would discuss this later in the week.
Did V-Tech market crap phones and claim the advanced security features when they didn’t exist.
Or does this schmuck have a Dr. Evil brand baby monitor. Or what?
What the fuck!?!
Without information about your particular phone model (or perhaps the model of the baby monitor) I cannot answer your question. But I can point out that the encryption used in most portable phones has been cracked:
I also will point out that it seems the encryption is 20 years old, and I know that I was able to listen to phone calls from my neighbors on my walkie talkies less than 20 years ago.
I’m sure that I once read that the encryption on some cell phones deactivates automatically when there is a low signal in order to improve transmission so that might be a possibility.
To be honest, I think that your biggest immediate problem is that your neighbour has most likely been listening in on you for a while :eek:. It seems incredibly unlikely that a freak baby monitor transmission incident would occur exactly at the same time as you making emergency calls sufficiently interesting for your neighbour to be unable to resist coming round. I wouldn’t take him at his word regarding to how he heard you either, you might want to check for evidence of mic’s or camera’s.
I don’t know about that. If the neighbor had gone to the trouble of placing mics and cameras, why would he spill the beans by telling him he had listened to a phone call? Doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do if you want to spy on someone.
I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s probably still worth checking. Setting up cameras and mics to spy on your neighbour is probably not the kind of thing that a smart person gets involved in to start with, but it does happen.
I’m not sure that’s the same feature. This phone is Digital Spread Spectrum. The signal is digitized, and then spread over the entire frequency spectrum. According to a book I have if a computer could break a million of the digital codes per second it would take 2000 years to break them all. Also, because the signal is spread over the entire spectrum of frequencies, one would need something like 10000 scanners to pick up every frequency it was spread over.
And since when are baby monitors digital in the 3.2 gig range?
I’m more inclined to think that V-Tech put analog equipment into this thing and passed it off as digital!:mad:
Can you specify your VTECH model? There is no such model as a 3.2GHz phone. VTECH made 900MHz, 2.4GHz, 5.8GHz and DECT6.0 (1.9GHz) models for the US.
Some of the 900MHz models were analog modulation which could be picked up by a 900MHz baby monitor.
Many new baby monitors use the same circuitry as cordless phones but it would be difficult to have them link together. Can you find out the make and model of the baby monitor?
What’s the guy supposed to do – turn off his baby monitor whenever he hears you on the phone?
When I was in high school, my best friend’s parents had one of those police scanner radios. It would pick up cordless conversations, and that’s how she found out that one of her neighbors was going to vandalize their car.
I want to know what the heck kind of baby monitor he has, and how long he’s been hearing our phone calls. I didn’t have time to talk with him right then and there.
I specifically bought this phone because it is supposed to be impervious to this sort of thing.
I don’t like to be suspicious but I have to wonder if your neighbor doesn’t have some other way to listen in that they didn’t want you to know about and made up the baby monitor story not realizing that it wasn’t feasible.
Do you know if they actually have a baby? Do you know if they actually have a baby monitor? Suggest a test using your phone and the monitor. Tell them that you want to understand what’s going on, don’t act like you don’t believe them. If they hem and haw or refuse then you may have reason to be suspicious.
Well, when I was on the other end of this situation, back in the day when I had an infant and lived in an apartment, I just switched my baby monitor to a different channel when it started picking up a neighbor’s cordless phone call. I was a lot more interested in keeping an ear on my baby boy than in eavesdropping on her phone gossip. (OK, I’ll admit it was a bit tempting, but I didn’t ponder the options for more than a half a minute …)
I don’t get all this suspicion toward the neighbor. If the neighbor had ill intent, why would he tell his victim he was listening to phone calls? Sounds to me like the neighbor was just giving the OP a heads up that his calls weren’t secure.
Yeah, it seems to me that the OP has every right to be upset, but at the company that sold him the phone, not at the neighbor. It seems to me that telling pkbites that his phone was leaky was a good, neighborly thing to do.
