The telephone was invented in 1876; phone tapping in the 1890s. Today, phone tapping is widespread. A report issued by the UK’s Interception of Communications Commissioner found that 253,557 applications were made in the last nine months of 2006 by 653 state bodies that are authorised to intercept phone calls, including local councils tapping the phones of persons suspected of illegal acts such as fly-tipping, benefit fraud and rogue trading.

However, the use of phone tapping is no longer the preserve of governments or the military, and cheap, easy-to-use equipment is now available to anyone who wants it.

In the most recent scandals, civilians’ phones have been compromised –­ from journalists by the secret service in the Netherlands, to journalists themselves tapping the phones of scores of UK politicians and celebrities.

In Italy, phone tapping is particularly rife and has led to many having details of their personal conversations splashed across the headlines.

The fall of the Peruvian cabinet in January 2009 occurred after politicians were implicated in rigging multimillion-dollar oil contracts through tapping the phones of lawyers and businessmen.

Reliance on phones, in particular on smart mobile phones and voice over IP, is growing fast. Such phones are now commonly used for many applications, including mobile commerce and banking, making them ever more important to our daily lives. With significant money changing hands, awareness of security issues is growing fast. These issues include the dangers of malware such as viruses, or programs that can capture data being input via the phone’s keypad. Many of these issues are similar to those affecting compute devices connected to IP-enabled networks.

There is one security issue that is unique to telecommunications – ­ that of eavesdropping. During the Second World War, the US and UK governments ran campaigns under slogans such as “Loose lips might sink ships” and “Careless talk costs lives” to encourage citizens to be careful about what they said and to whom.

Today, that second slogan could be better worded as “Careless talk costs profits”. The problem with phones is that eavesdropping can easily be done electronically. There are hundreds of products that can be cheaply and easily used to intercept phone calls.

Any organisation that encourages the use of mobile and portable devices should put in place policies regarding how such equipment should be used and the safeguards that should be taken to protect them. Such policies should address the social aspects of communications, such as not using mobiles to discuss business deals in crowded places, and the security technologies that should be in place to secure communications. Of these, encryption is a key tool that should be considered for all portable devices – ­ including mobile phones.

Encryption technologies available for mobile devices include those that encrypt the data in files and folders on smartphones. Such products will enable an organisation to shield itself from data loss should the smartphone be lost or stolen.

Newer encryption products encrypt the traffic in transit, such as a phone conversation between two devices equipped with the same encryption software, to protect the callers from eavesdropping. The use of standard mobile phones and smartphones will make this an attractive option for firms wishing to retrofit their existing phones with encryption capabilities.

As organisations grapple with keeping their sensitive digital data safe, the same standards of security should be applied to one of the commonest form of business communication ­ – voice.

For more from Quocirca analysts, read the blog at http://quocirca.computing.co.uk