Does that necessarily mean there are no terrorist communications, or does it simply mean that terrorists have found other effective ways to carry their twisted plans across continents? The advent of prepaid calling cards and the proliferation of Voice over IP telephony have made mobile phones almost irrelevant.
In one case study, a prominent telecommunications company discovered that several thousand dollars in phone time had been purchased with stolen credit cards. Despite extremely tight security, this company still succumbed to crackdowns by people who were clearly hell-bent on getting airtime. Subsequent tracing of the IPs indicated that the orders had not only been placed using heavy IP masking, but had originated from hacked computers and the tracing ended in Lebanon. A careful analysis of the call records (CDR) indicated that hundreds of phone calls had been made using the same prepaid account to several high-threat countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia, the United Arab Emirates, and some European countries.
One of the most interesting points from the investigation of the source phone numbers was that most of them were fake. With Internet technology, directing and redirecting calls from one IP to the next is as easy as Googling it. In fact, with VoIP you can easily have a local New York phone number literally anywhere in the world.
The intention was to hide all traces of the conversations. The scope of this operation is unknown; however, the truth is that companies that had lax security measures lost thousands of dollars. Customer chargebacks always hit merchants. What is certain is that people are making phone calls to countries that harbor terrorists using stolen credit cards and high-tech methods to mask the origin of their outgoing phone calls.
The FBI was duly notified and a subpoena was issued for the CDRs. However, it is not certain how much progress the FBI made on the case. Most telecommunications companies protect the identities of their customers and their CDRs, whether they are peaceful citizens or hardened terrorists. Unfortunately, there is also no effective law that provides for the timely collection of much-needed sensitive CDRs. Therefore, the answer to where all the talk has gone can be answered using prepaid phone cards and VoIP protocols that have made it possible to completely mask phone conversations and drive the talk underground.
