Cell phone snooping not so easy in Singapore
A method discovered recently to spy on cell phones in the United States is not likely to work in Singapore, according to telcos here.
Two months ago, two researchers based in the U.S. announced they had found a "legal" way to spy on individuals by identifying their mobile phone numbers and using those to track their whereabouts.
Central to the claims by Nick DePetrillo and Don Bailey was their ability to access a public database which links names to respective numbers. This database is used for caller identification purposes, and the researchers were able to exploit the system to churn out users' names by making calls to it from spoofed phone numbers.
But telcos in Singapore said such an exploit would be highly impossible here. Representatives from SingTel and StarHub, in response to ZDNet Asia's queries, said their databases are not in the public domain and thus protected from outsider access.
They said their databases are also maintained by the individual telcos and not shared under a central authority. Unlike a public listing such as the Yellow Pages for landline numbers, mobile phones are not listed in such a manner and remain private, StarHub added.
In addition, any intrusion to these systems would be in violation of the country's Computer Misuse Act, said Cyril Chua, a partner with Singapore law firm Bird & Bird, in an e-mail to ZDNet Asia.
The Computer Misuse Act does not expressly prohibits spoofing caller numbers, but it is illegal to transmit false or fabricated data.
The U.S. passed a bill in April to make caller ID spoofing illegal, although the two researchers insisted in another report that their methods were still legal as they were not executing the spoofing for deceptive purposes.
The duo also claimed the information derived from the caller ID database could be used to extract even more information, such as the location of the user. While the Home Location Register database, which logs users' whereabouts, is off limits to the public, the researchers said some small telcos offer access to this, for a fee.
A number of reverse phone lookup services exist online as well. In the U.S., private investigators charge between US$70 and US$200 to perform a reverse cell phone number trace, which produces a user's details such as name and address, matched to his mobile number.