As the story goes, anything on the public networks is fair game for interception. No laws broken if you receive secret police broadcasts or cell phone conversations, for example. However, if you retransmit or act upon the information in the transmission, you could be in deep doo doo.
Bank transactions are probably the most secure transmissions in the world. LOL They do indeed put a lot of effort and expense into preserving the security of their business. I still think it's harder to get at an underground cable than it is to point your telescope at a light source in open air, but that's not the hard part.
I read about the NSA and how they protect communications between the president and the people he contacts. You can't even tell there is a signal being transmitted when the president talks. Unless you are a president who insists on using his private cell phone to do business.
Trump only uses a Secure cell phone for things that need to be secure, such as exchanges with military.
He uses a standard off the shelf Schmartz-Fone for almost all other calls, including his posts to Twitter.
He also has yet another cell phone he uses when contacting or needing to be contacted by his business ventures and family members.
As far as I know, only the Secure presidential phone cannot be copied via normal methods.
I suppose us Ham Radio Operators could intercept the call, but it would be heavily encrypted, and possibly even using double encryption, which I hear is totally impossible to crack.
It's spread spectrum. There are many (I don't know exactly how many) channels of secure communication in use during one transmission. I'd guess no less than 128, but there could be more. The voice is chopped up into pieces and the pieces are spread out over all the channels in random order. Even if you were lucky enough to tune into one of them, all you would hear is something akin to white noise. Likewise the power is distributed across a broad band of frequencies so that not even a spectrum analyzer would be able to detect a transmission. And on top of that, as you point out, it's encrypted.
My understanding is that the military in China and in Russia are tapped into what you call the normal Schmartz-Fone which is basically monitoring any sounds the phone can pick up. So while our fearless leader is on a secure phone with the pentagon, his Schmartz-Fone laying on the table next to him is broadcasting every word it can hear.
I'm almost certain Trump has finally gotten rid of his personal Android phone, after NSA finally came up with one for him to use as a person phone and transferred his call list over to it.
From what I understand, whenever he needs to make a call of importance, he used a hardwired phone, and not even the secure cellular phone. Plus, when he was carrying his personal cell phone, he put it inside the security box outside his office. Just because he knew it was possible to be monitored.
I'm sure he doesn't mind Russia or China listening in on the types of conversations he has on his personal phone. He might even be using it as a ploy to confuse them, hi hi.
Yes, that is the intelligence/counter intelligence game. There are times when we let the enemy know some "secrets" just to mislead them. And, of course, they reciprocate with the same ploy. Last I read about the unsecured private phone carried by the president, he refused to give it up. A lot of things have changed since then so that the story line you give could be more up to date.
Twitter made some tweaks to the way they do things. The only thing I'm interested in knowing is if the people I'm following are real or robots. One day I lost about 40 followers which Twitter deemed were not real people. Why the hell a robot would follow me is a mystery. It's easy enough to tell the real from the fake accounts, but that takes a lot of time searching through random profiles. The president certainly uses Twitter to promote his personal agenda, but not every one of his tweets are written by him.
Bots follow people in hope they will follow back. When they get enough folks following them back, they then sell that account name to someone else, so they start out with for eg. 100,000 followers. And there are idiots who will buy such a package.
On Twitter, the number of followers you have is basically a meaningless number anyhow.
How many of those people following you have you placed in one of their Daily Read Lists?
If they don't have you in a List, they are not going to see your Tweets.
Unless they are new and still use the Main Twitter Feed until they have more followers themselves.
If you do look at the main news feed, how many times have you seen Get 50k followers for $39.95?
If you get suckered into paying for the followers, 49k of those are just bots who autofollow back.
I use a service that tells me who unfollowed me so I can unfollow them.
Unfortunately, I've picked up tons of Arabic speaking followers. Not really sure how either.
I don't use an auto-follow-back program, so have to physically accept each follower.
I think they may have come from a program I used to show who was following me that I was not following back.
And their names and tag lines were in English, until after I followed them, then they changed it back to Arabic.
That's the only way I can see I wound up with so many I know I didn't follow, but sometimes the names look familiar.
I have this one person I'm not following, and they renew their request for me to follow every single day.
To get them off my list, I finally followed them back. The very next day they are on my list of unfollowers, so I unfollow, and lo and behold, when I get to the followers I'm not following back, there they are again, within minutes. So I know they are a bot for sure.
I went to their page to block them, and the ability to block is not there like it is on everyone else.
A hacker maybe? So I've tried typing in their screen name to block them that way. There it is, in my blocked list. But I still get the daily request every single day, hi hi.
I know years ago, there was a way to spoof names by backspacing over them and adding something else, so the viewer sees one name, but the computer sees a totally different name. I don't know how to see if they did that or not.
Oh well, another annoyance about Twitter, hi hi.
I ONLY view the few people I have on Lists, so it really don't matter, except for the everyday chore of unfollowing them.
I don't what version of Twitter you are using, but I never get requests for or from follows. The choice of whether somebody follows me or not is theirs, not mine. Tweetdeck is my program of choice because I can display several filtered lists in one window. l always include my main timeline and I have seen those ads to buy followers. I never took an interest in those ads and let them scroll on by. I have nothing to sell nor am I peddling any influence so that followers are nice to have but not very important. The point of me being on Twitter at all is the information I can get from others. I seldom send out an original tweet but do a lot of re-tweets. If somebody likes my re-tweets so much they should be following the source and not me. LOL
The bot nets are very powerful tools and they are not all there to sell something. They exist primarily to create trends and post bogus stories that promote their agenda. Facebook has the same kind of botnets and I'm sure you've read about the trouble they got into for supporting them financially. As far as I know Twitter gets nothing from the bots. In fact they are deleting those accounts as soon as the detect them.
It's fairly easy for them to check for bot posts, and those who use auto-post systems.
No matter how many posts they line up, when the cycle runs it is normally on a fixed schedule.
And that is how they get caught.
One of my book promoters used to post about 5 books per day by hand, so the times were random.
Then she thought it would be easier to use an auto-posting program and place one book every two hours.
Since the program posted each book post at exactly the same time each day, even though they were spread out to two hours apart, they nailed her for using an auto-poster, hi hi.
So now she just posts all of them at once by hand each day again now, and is done with it for the day.
I use a program which tells me who unfollowed me, and who followed me that didn't appear on the Twitter new followers list.
For a long time, when this program showed me who followed me, and they didn't appear on my Twitter new followers list, I would check them by name on Twitter, and sure enough it showed them as following me.
Then I learned the reason why. Twitter lags by about a day on updating the new followers list.
So, if I wait a day to follow them back, there they are the next day on the list.
There are so many helpful features Twitter should add to their program but have never done so.
This is why there are no so many third party vendors of programs for handling Twitter accounts.
But Twitter keeps changing the rules on how they can work and many get cut off.
I'm just glad I use one that has never been cut off or been suspended for breaking Twitters new rules each time they come down the pike. If a new rule will affect them, they change their program instantly to be in accord with the new rules.
I've been holding my Twitter account around 12k followers now for a couple of years. I remove about 15 to 30 per day who either stopped following, or I figured out they were a bot.
There was a time when several third parties wrote programs to use the Twitter feed with their particular brand of upgrade. It got to the point that more people were using those third party apps than were using the original twitter app. This situation, of course, had some severe repercussions on their business model and advertisers. So, Twitter bought out Tweetdeck which incorporated a few of those features lacking in the original Twitter. They also changed the API so that those third parties no longer were able to directly access the Twitter feed. When that happened the Twitter user count increased dramatically and the revenues from advertisers started to increase.
There are a handful of services out there who will manage your Twitter account, such as the unfollower tracking program. Those people use your account to do their thing, thus do not take users away from the original Twitter feed. In fact they can't use the traditional API either. They have to get all their power from your account, and you have to explicitly agree to let them do it.
I'm running small potatoes here and don't need any management. It would be nice to have statistics for my Twitter transactions and the people l deal with, or not. But the only "free" services for that kind of thing are temporary or severely limited in function. I'm not in need of paying Twitter to read their output.
