Motherboard

The shock and awe over the thousands of hacked pager messages from September 11, 2001 just anonymously published online isn’t just about painful memories. There’s also the big question as to how all those mundane, terrible and weird messages — 573,000 lines and 6.4 million words, to be exact — were stolen to begin with.

It probably wasn’t very hard. And despite all the inevitable conspiracy theories circling the messages, you needn’t be the NSA or a foreign spy agency to do it. Back in 1998, someone also grabbed the pager messages of President Clinton’s entourage during its trip to Philadelphia, capturing decidely less terrible messages, like NBA scores and staff love notes.

As CBS News’ Declan McCullagh writes, it could have been done with a single pager, a laptop and some software, using “over-the-air interception”:

Each digital pager is assigned a unique Channel Access Protocol code, or capcode, that tells it to pay attention to what immediately follows. In what amounts to a gentlemen’s agreement, no encryption is used, and properly-designed pagers politely ignore what’s not addressed to them.

But an electronic snoop lacking that same sense of etiquette might hook up a sufficiently sophisticated scanner to a Windows computer with lots of disk space — and record, without much effort, gobs and gobs of over-the-air conversations.

Existing products do precisely this. Australia’s WiPath Communications offers Interceptor 3.0 (there’s even a free download). Maryland-based SWS Security Products sells something called a “Beeper Buster” that it says let police “watch up to 2500 targets at the same time.” And if you’re frugal, there’s a video showing you how to take a $10 pager and modify it to capture everything on that network.

See the video above from Adafruit if you want to snoop on your local police and drug dealers. If that’s a bit too complicated, you might want to start with the FCC’s history of pagers for kids.