Last week-end, David Beckham’s alleged love affair in Madrid came in the public eye. But what is new is that the information was supposed to come from the SMS he exchanged with his belle.
Now mobile phone industry and experts declare it is nearly unfeasable to eavesdrop on text messages.
Transmission of SMS is protected through a scrambling system. If some studies pointed out potential weakness in the system, the possibility of intercepting SMS “in-flight” has never been proved.
There is another potential way to read someone else’s SMS: mobile phone operators keep records of them for a few weeks or months to prevent disputes over phone bills. But then firms probably retain routing and billing information. Not the content.
See article in BBC News Technology.