Office telephones used as listening devices?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. I heard a friend mention that he had heard that codes could be entered into office telephones which could allow someone to listen in on conversations in another office, even if the phone was on hook. Anyone ever heard this before?

A. I've seen a police equipment catalog that offered phones which could be used to eavesdrop on conversations. Supposedly, what you do is plant the phone in the suspects house or office, then by simply calling it you could listen in. In a real world scenario, our phones at work (nortel's Meridian System) offer a feature called Voice call. If the target phone is equipped with a speakerphone, you could dial in though the voice call feature, and the other party's speakerphone would automatically be activated. The system will warn the other party, however, by emitting a loud HONK! every minute or so. Perhaps you somehow activated a similar feature. This was vectored with a fair amount of accuracy in 'Gorky Park'. The investigator's office had dial phones. He would turn the dial and jam it with a pencil when he wanted to be sure of privacy. Most of the older anolog phones only opened one side of the line when you put the receiver on the hookswitch. This meant that you had one side of the line still passing through the receiver and transmitter. By placing a sensitive pickup on that side of the line it would be possible to use the handset as a receiver, even though the phone was on the hook. When you dial a rotary phone, the contacts make and break the connection the appropriate number of times. This would make for a loud noise in your ear as you dial, so these phones have a shunt circuit in them. When you turn the dial, the circuit is shunted through the dial contacts without being routed through the handset. So, a phone with the dial partially turned would not be useable as a bug. One feature of many office phone systems is that it's possible to talk to someone without them having to touch their equipment. I have seen a number of variations on this theme: [1] On the AT&T Merlin I used, any extension could call out to any other, and the person called would immediately hear the caller's voice; for the person called to talk back, they would have to either push the speaker- phone button or else pick up the receiver. [2] On the system that replaced the Merlin when it had a little lightning problem (I forget what brand) calling an extension would cause a beep at that extension and, about 1 second later, automatically go into bi- directional speaker phone. Individual extensions could disable this feature, in which case the phone would "ring". [3] On the Meridian at work now, the only way I am aware of to do the equi- valent of #1 is to do a page; as far as I know this can only be originated from a key phone (not from an "ordinary" extension-type phone). Is anyone out there familiar with the Meridian who would have any useful ideas on this subject?

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