lws@comm.wang.com (Lyle Seaman) (03/21/90)
More on the phone harrasment thing. We were occasionally getting obscene phone calls at home, from (among others) an adult male with a very juvenile sense of humour. I say we, but the only one who ever received them was my wife. She was upset because they knew her first name. I suggested that they probably didn't know her, but had gotten her name from the phone book where it is listed, either before or after reaching our answering machine, which stated "You have reached the Seaman residence..." Anyway, this idiot left an obscene message on a ** tape recorder ** !! I've saved it in case these continued and the law was called in. ( I still can't believe it!) I since changed the outgoing message, and I haven't received any more calls since 3 months ago. On a tape recorder! Lyle sendmail.cf under construction, pardon the From: lws@comm.wang.com (or, uunet!comm.wang.com!lws) (508) 967-2322
gsarff@cs.utah.edu (Gary Sarff) (03/21/90)
I have been wondering something for some time about tracing of phone calls. This may not be possible since it doesn't seem to be done, but... When one makes a toll-call, the information about the call shows up on your bill. So, some equipment somewhere is communicating with a billing computer, and it seems to me that the billing informaation for the calls you make are, by necessity, stored for some period of time, up to the time of printing of your next bill. This could be as much as one month. So, to find out where a call is coming from, say in the case of harassment, or kidnapping ransom calls or some such thing, why can't the billing records of telco's be searched? If for example, you received a call, at 1pm in the afternoon, and say given as a starting point, that it is believed to have originated from the same state you are in, somewhere there could be (if it wasn't a local no-charge call) a billing record on someone else's phone bill with your number on it at a time of 1pm. Is this a jurisdictional thing? Technologically not feasible? It seems that it would be easier than trying to put a trace on a line at just the time needed to catch someone and hoping that the caller stays on long enough to complete the trace. signed, very curious. [Moderator's Note: For that matter, in ESS offices, even local calls are logged. Now and then to audit my bill I ask for a print out for the past month of all calls charged as 'units'. You'd think something similar to 'grep' could be used to scan a few million records in a fairly short time looking for all instances of calls to a given number. That's not to say they would always get an answer -- certainly not from non-ESS offices -- but frequently they'd get a very good idea of who was connected to whom, and when. PT]