Monday, February 01, 2010

Evil Mind

I was going through the IEEE paper on the scandal "The Athens Affair". First of all, though the scandal is grave, probably it went un-noticed (by media) or did not receive the attention it deserved.

About the scandal - As the name suggests, it happened in Athens during the period of Athens Olympics in the last decade. It was discovered accidentally that the mobile telephones of some of the big names of Greece (including the then PM, defense minister) were tapped and conversations recorded.

Telephone tapping is nothing new...Remember President Nixon...Or closer home Mr Ramakrishna Hegde resigned as CM of Karnataka because of phone tapping controversy. 

The IEEE paper I referred to, is the a technical explanation of how such a mechanism was actually implemented. A couple of pages through the paper, I lost interest in the "HOW" part of the story. I was wondering on "WHY" and "WHAT NEXT"?. So clearly I was not interested in technical aspect of how the phones were tapped, but was more interested in the brain behind, reasons for the setup and the massive cover-up later.
Wondering " 'Why' did I loose interest in WHY?"

One possible reason is  - I am not a hardcore techie (at-least not the hackers type).
Other reason could be - Reading thrillers rather than reading technical books has dropped the technical curiosity in me.

But a more realistic reason (or so I think) is - I cannot reuse the technical aspect of the hack (because security-wise the systems could be robust now). It could be of some use later in life, if I get to know why hackers hacked the phone. I may be in such a situation and hacking could be a solution then (WHY part). And more important - how I can save myself later, if caught (WHAT NEXT part).

Now that’s called "Evil mind". Isn't it?

No comments: