Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we've obtained official records that prove they were right all along [ UK ]

dailymail.co.u ^ | January 28, 2023 | Glen Owen

[robowombat]

To my knowledge NSA has been doing this in some fashion for over forty years starting with monitoring both a hotlist of phone numbers and surveilling the long distance and overseas phone lines when most was cable traffic. Pretty much well known and mentioned in a number of open sources. Hotlists have been used longer than that going back to the 30’s or so. For instance using a trap to capture every number the German or Soviet embassy phones called and then after refinement hot listing the numbers both to tap conversations and to capture every number these numbers contacted. I think the FBI pioneered this technique. Years ago there were people in DC who would only make important calls from pay phones or move around and use individuals ‘phone for hire residential phones, This stuff used to be a lot of fun when it was basically spy vs spy or spying on commies like Paul Robeson.

[robowombat]

In passing, in early 1974 while working as a contractor for DEA I took part in hotlisting and building a relational network of all numbers called from a Cleveland Ohio restaurant named ‘The Egg and I’. This restaurant had a battery of 20 pay phones completely covering its back wall. It was notorious for bookies and numbers bank operators to use to place bets. Ir also was extensively used by organized crime characters to hide in plain sight and make business calls. The call volume was huge and it took days to sort the honest, the mundane gambling calls from the made guy calls. Eventual a very large relational network was built. It included some surprises, such as an assistant US Attorney who had nmany private calls with a lot of gangland types.