Several Pennsylvanian researchers have hypothesized that people who are being wiretapped by authorities could render these spying gadgets inoperable by making VOIP calls or sending a stream of text messages to overpower their pathetically thin system bandwidths. These experts allege that they've found a critical vulnerability in American police wiretaps (even though it's still in the realm of theory) that can enable a surveillance mark to impede the coppers by launching a pseudo-DOS (Denial of Service) attack against the network connection between the authorities and the phone company.

According to the IDG News Service, the researchers from the University of Pennsylvania noticed the system weakness after analyzing the ANSI Standard J-STD-024 telecommunication industry standard, which tackled and handled wiretapped data transmissions from telecom switches for the FBI, CIA, and the police. Under Calea (otherwise known as the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act), telecoms are obliged to develop their network infrastructure in such a way that government-sponsored wiretaps sent over digitally switched phone networks are easy to execute.

The researchers' paper also noted that the standard allowed very little bandwidth for the transmission of wiretapped information for phone calls, which gave them the idea of theoretically inducing a DOS attack on the system transmission to interrupt or crash the wiretap altogether. Whenever the infiltrating device is activated, the phone company's switch launches a sixty-four-kilobytes-per-second Data Channel to transmit the info about the call to the police. This trifling and miserable channel can be disrupted by the person being wiretapped via sending a lot of simultaneous VOIP phone calls or SMS messages without significantly ruining his own traffic.

The researchers further claimed that law enforcement could suffer an information black out of sorts from tech-savvy targets who want to "cloak" their phone conversations from the privy ears of the authorities. The bandwidth assault could also make cops lose the records of whom or when the mark called as well as compromise the content of the phone calls.

The Pennsylvanian investigators tested their hypothesis with a special application they've coded that connected to a server over Sprint's 3G wireless network for forty times per second, thus simulating the aforementioned wiretap DOS attack. The method could also be reproduced using forty-two SMS messages and seven VOIP calls per second. However, they have yet to test their theories on an actual, real-life wiretapping system.