The History of Wiretapping
The need to know secrets has existed perhaps as long as humanity has communicated. Starting in ancient China, when a messenger would cover a message in wax and travel with it hidden in his stomach, people have been trying to communicate covertly. Code making began in the 9th century with the Arabs, and code breaking in the Middle Ages with Arab scholars deciphering a message without the necessary code.
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Telegraphs
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When the electric telegraph was invented in the mid 1800s, it superseded couriers because it was more reliable and much quicker. At first messages were unencrypted, but when wireless radio was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1901, it became much easier to intercept messages.
World Wars I and II
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Britain intercepted a message from Germany's foreign minister to an ambassador in Mexico City proposing that Mexico invade Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Britain wanted to use this information to draw the United States into World War I without revealing their wiretapping technology. The British employed a spy in Mexico to obtain a paper copy of the message from the ambassador in Mexico City and pass it along to the United States. The trickery worked, and the United States entered the war.
Winston Churchill became involved in signals intelligence during World War I and would later use his knowledge to intercept messages from Italy, Japan and Germany during World War II. President Truman authorized wiretapping for security purposes after World War II in anticipation of problems with Russia.
UKUSA
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The United Kingdom-USA Communications Intelligence Agreement is a nonconfirmed document that was supposedly signed by the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand in the late 1940s. The document was an agreement between these countries to separately wiretap and then exchange decoded messages. This document was created suspiciously near the time that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was formed.
Cold War
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Pine Gap was a base established in the 1970s in the middle of the Red Center, a dry desert area just outside of Alice Springs in Australia. The remote location provided a place to transmit signals the United States otherwise could not intercept due to the planet's curvature. Bird 1 was the piece of geostationary satellite the agents at Pine Gap used to monitor communist microwave communications during the Cold War.
Iraq War
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In 2003, Katherine Gunn, an eavesdropper employee for GCHQ, Government Communications Headquarters in the U.K., was arrested for leaking a memo to the press regarding the use of wiretapping for the purposes of illegally obtaining votes to enter the Iraq War. In 2005, President George W. Bush argued his decision to wiretap individuals he felt were a threat to the security of the United States without the court authorization required by law, stating the Patriot Act as a defense. He felt the country needed to know what potential terrorists were planning so they could be stopped.
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