![]() ![]() After years of practice, his ear strips away the static he listens simultaneously to stereo, television, and multiple scanners. In Douglass's thickly carpeted retreat, six scanners work steadily, hopping from channel to channel - short wave, VHF, UHF, sideband - all feeding into a little voice-activated Radio Shack tape recorder that vacuums up every scrap of voice, packing a day's talk into 90 minutes or so that Douglass listens to late at night. To those who criticize their listening in and who accuse them of endangering national security, Douglass and other monitors answer: "Hey, Radio Shack sells to the bad guys too anything we can hear, the spies can hear too." "Adds up to 19, right?" smirk the stealth watchers.) (Some stealth watchers even believe the Air Force called the fighter the F-117 simply so they could go on insisting there was no F-19, the logical designation for a new plane in official sequence. They insisted that the Stealth fighter existed years before the Air Force released the first murky snapshot and admitted its existence. Long before they tried to find out about the Manta or the Mach 6 Aurora, monitors, and black birders told us about the U-2 and a project called Oxcart, which turned out to be the SR-71 Blackbird. The real culprit was later found, but Douglass now sweeps the place monthly for bugs. Suits suddenly appeared in the windows of the long-vacant house behind him, and a bug showed up on his phone. When he was suspected of tapping the cellular phone of a Texas congressman - the FBI paid Douglass a visit. It's all completely legal - except for the practice of listening in on cellular phones, something Douglass finds of little use. Until recently, even Air Force One broadcast communications without first encrypting them. Encryption is used at high-level bases, but it's expensive and vulnerable to atmospheric shifts. Current equipment can cover thousands of channels a second, defeating most "channel-hopping" transmitters. Several other companies, including Bearcat and Uniden, also make scanners. ![]()
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