[GLLUG] FAX

[Mark Preston]

On 19/10/14 01:52, Christopher Hunter wrote:
>
> On 18/10/14 07:14, Mark Preston wrote:
>>
>> Faxes are actually very secure.
>
> Err... No they're not. At all.
>
> I had the job of designing a fax intercept machine for Police monitoring
> of communications traffic way back in the 80s!
>
> Chris
>
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Hi Chris,
Thank you for your reply, and also thanks to Bernard, Richard and James 
for their replies to my assertion which may well be wrong. I have no 
great technical knowledge on this issue, but I am interested to find out 
more about it. My comment was mainly based on some conversations I had 
with a person who worked for BT many years ago. He recently died so I 
can't ask him for clarification. Basically he told me he worked for a 
special BT unit that installed the phone lines that supplied fax 
machines and other telecommunications stuff in places like security 
offices and foreign embassies in London. He claimed that the encryption 
used for transmitting faxes was very secure.
	In the same way that people like police can intercept phone calls I 
imagine that people can intercept faxes, but in relation to plain text 
email security this can still be considered very secure. I imagine that 
your fax intercept machine worked by redirecting the output of the fax, 
or copying it in some way similar to listening in on a phone call.

-- 
Regards,
Mark Preston