Communications Security

When I joined the USAF, I never knew that there were people who would be interested in what I said, but I quickly learned that there are a lot of people in the world that just love to listen to you talk. On your phone, on your mobile phone,
 for you that are radio "hams", there is always someone in the world that is listening to you.

In the beginning it was only the military listening to the others military as most of the orders sent from the high commanders was sent down to the lower echelons by radio or land line. Long before that there was only written messages, but they were easily intercepted, read, copied if necesssary, and sent on. Of course that required that you stop the messenger and kill him so he couldn't tell the "enemy" that the message had been read. Most of the time they never knew that a message was sent, so it could not be acted upon.

When they started to use radio or morse code, then the "enemy" could listen in and read what was being said. This led to encryption such as the famous Enigma machine used by the German U-boots in the Second World War. That it had been broken, was never discovered until after the war. But this started everyone else to think of using  better encryption methods using the new fangled thing called a computer. The harder to break codes were built using the best and newest computers so that meant the countries needed to develop bigger and faster machines to help break the codes. And on and on it goes.

Now they have the ability to listen to your phone calls using satelites. But they can't listen to every call so they have programmed computers to listen and flag calls that use certain "key" words. Like: spy, nuclear, bomb, drug or drugs, etc. I think you get my drift. This is why most the drug dealers use only code words and keep changing them so that they hope the governments don't understand what they are talking about.

So as long as you just talk about your normall everyday lives, you will not be bothered. But try to talk about something that a government might be interested in and your voice will be recorded and analysed. And who knows, one of these days there will be a knock on your door and lo and behold .......