I found it very interesting to read in the paper this morning about how EXACTLY the Columbian authorities were able to LOCATE Pablo Escobar. The article stated that Pablo was concerned about his wife and child's safety and called them on a CELLULAR phone to check up on them. The Columbian Police did not know where either of them were located. It stated that the U.S. government (DEA in print, but was it the NSA?) gave or let the Columbian police borrow equipment that did the following: 1) The equipment scanned all the cellular phone frequencies used in that area. 2) Already having a voice print/sample of Pablo's voice, the equipment continuously compared cellular conversations with those they had of Pablo, in near real time. 3) Once a match was made, the equipment would triangulate? or otherwise locate the origin of the call within two minutes. It did not say how good the accuracy of the location was (ie within 1 mile or 1/10 of a mile or 10 feet, etc.) however. Apparently it was CLOSE ENOUGH. This is sophisticated, no question about it. I imagine the equipment/circuits are available to do all this to the general U.S. public, but still, I think the NSA probably provided the equipment as it was probably all integrated together and fairly idiot-proof to use. Maybe one big box, with a few of these big boxes being dispersed about the country-side. The report stated that Escobar was worth a few Billion dollars and that he was a smart man. Why didn't he use encryption? This would have thwarted the police. Of course you may say, how many encrypted cellular conversations take place in that part of Columbia, and the answer would probably be close to zero if not zero. So just modify the equipment to recognize encrypted/scrambled speech or whatever and locate the source. Fine, but if Escobar has so much money and so many allies, why not buy many encrypted cellular set-ups and distribute them to his people (paying them of course) to move throughout the region constantly and make cellular encrypted phone calls at random? Now, tying this in with the 'ol Clipper-chip debate, if Escobar who is worth billions of dollars, is smart, and is considered one of the biggest drug kingpins in history does not use encryption, how many lower-level criminals, who don't have the financial resources nor the intelligence will? Lex