Many low-level phone company people don't know from encryption, and consider just being digital to be enough to satisfy their market's demand for privacy :-( On the other hand, if they're telling the truth that the FBI had somebody's cellphone shut down because they couldn't wiretap it, that's pretty outrageous, and would seem to constitute a "taking". And an illegal wiretap besides, most likely -- with a warrant, they could simply put the tap at the base station. The story may be true, but it doesn't sound quite right to me. I recently got a TDMA phone (a Nokia 2160), which is capable of doing some sort of encryption, though I'm not sure what algorithm. It doesn't always encrypt even when in digital mode (it can handle AMPS, too), but there's a configuration option to tell the user whether or not encryption is in use.