Cellular telephone users in Japan are complaining that their conversations are being tapped, the Teleputing Hotline reports – and the situation has securities firms and credit card companies worried as they fear that their confidential information is falling into malevolent ears: as an emergency measure, such users are taking their own precautions such as not mentioning company and customer names during conversations, keeping the distribution lists of their mobile phone numbers as short as possible, changing numbers periodically, and using NTT’s confidential phone service – this involves a special receiver rented at $13 a month and has between 5,000 and 6,000 users, but an engineer told the Hotline that this system too will be cracked within five or six years; the radio receivers used to eavesdrop cost just $300 and while the law prohibits leaking information, it does not prohibit sales of the gadgets; replacing the cellular nets with all-digital ones is seen as one solution.
