Through e-mail, charliemerritt@BIX.com writes: | | > A 1-900 number to ensure non-tracibility. Does anyone have this number? | | I would not trust this for hiding from law enforcement. [ ... ] I wouldn't either. Anybody with a bit of sense shouldn't trust something like that. If anything, it's likely a setup to attract certain types of callers anyways. | If not law enforcement, then who do you need this to hide from? | You can use a pay fone to fool caller-id boxes. Well, I guess | they dont hide the city. [ ... ] Well, let's not assume someone wants to hide, but what about assuring the privacy of the phone call? Afterall, this is what we use PGP for: for email privacy... though there has been speculation about just how secure this is. I correspond with people all over the world. If the government is keeping a tab on people that correspond and is watching their email, then they must know me pretty well. They can't be too concerned that I'm using PGP to correspond with someone in Moscow. It's been over a year, and noone's came knocking on my door. ;) Back to the subject: What about phone privacy? In this day and age, how can we absolutely guarantee a private phone call? Even if we are using voice-encryption tech, the call can still be traced. I think even more quickly than we are lead to believe. For example, I never bought the notion that they had to keep the call on for a certain amount of time before an actual trace could be performed. Maybe in the stone-age of Ma Bell, but not today. I suppose if one were able to use a setup like a remailer only on a phone network, whereby you got your call forwarded through different places to prevent a trace (doubt that's reasonably accomplished), it might make the trace a bit more difficult. There doesn't appear to be anything even cryptographically that we can do other than encrypting the voice and selectively using pay fones. It would be neat if there were some way to interfere with Ma Bell's computer, in a non-destructive way, to alter what information they get when we dial out. For instance,