One of the plethora of TV Magazine shows featured Tim McViegh and phone cards last week. Maybe I should post to Risks. According to the story, Tim McViegh bought a bunch of phone cards from "The Spotlight" (famous Klan paper) which carried the Spotlight brand name. He made lots of calls. Later, the Fibbies who checked all the phone records for room and pay phones at the motels where TM was staying came up with lots of calls to the 800 number of the vendor who was actually switching calls for the Spotlight phone cards. The vendor found the card number(s) that matched those calls and all the other calls that matched those card numbers. They made it seem like such a match was a big thing. Perhaps their transaction database was not well developed. In any case, they wrote a little software and gave the Fibbies a list of all of TM's calls. There are supposed to be lots of calls to fertilizer dealers, his sister, and others. Very interesting. This is an obvious risk in the use of phone cards that anyone should be able to figure out for themselves since it is the same risk that pay phones have always had. If the Fibbies can find out what telephones you have used, they can get those records and trace things from there. This problem has occurred before for "right wing" nuts and the Mafia. Several years ago after members of The Order robbed an armored car in northern California, the Fibbies found a nearby motel where a bunch of suspicious characters had all stayed together and traced calls from the pay phone outside to various wives/girl friends and broke the case from there. Likewise Mafiosi in their NYC social clubs have often shown bad phone habits using the nearest pay phone, etc. If a pay phone is used enough and well-enough known to the Fibbies, it even becomes worthwhile to tap it. So buy lots of phone cards from different dealers (*never* The Spotlight), use phones unconnected to you, don't make too many calls from the same phone or using the same card, and be sure to destroy the card preferably before you use it (the only significant thing about phone cards are the numbers which can be stored in an encrypted file). An easy way to accomplish much of the above is to hang out in big cities instead of the boonies. It's a lot easier to find an unlinked phone (unlinked to you, that is) in the city than in the country. DCF "'Well, he hit what he was aiming at.' Marine DI discussing the fact that the guy up in the tower at the University of Texas shooting people was an ex-Marine."