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Telephone tapping in the Eastern Bloc was a widespread method of the mass surveillance of the population by the secret police.

History

In the past, telephone tapping was an open and legal practice in certain countries. During martial law in Poland, official censorship was introduced, which included open phone tapping. Despite the introduction of the new censorship division, the Polish secret police did not have resources to monitor all conversations.

In Romania, telephone tapping was conducted by the General Directorate for Technical Operations of the Securitate. Created with Soviet assistance in 1954, the outfit monitored all voice and electronic communications inside and outside of Romania. They bugged telephones and intercepted all telegraphs and telex messages, as well as placed microphones in both public and private buildings.

Fiction

The 1991 Polish comedy film Calls Controlled capitalizes on this fact. The title alludes to the pre-recorded message "Rozmowa kontrolowana" ("The call is being monitored") being sounded during phone calls while the martial law in Poland was in force during the 1980s.

The 2006 film The Lives of Others concerns a Stasi captain who is listening to the conversations of a suspected dissident writer in a bugged apartment with equipment including telephone-tapping.

See also

• Covert listening device
• Eastern Bloc politics
• Echelon (signals intelligence)
• Mass surveillance
• Privacy of correspondence
• Secure telephone

References

1. Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing (NED - New ed.). Boydell & Brewer. 2016. ISBN 978-1-57113-926-9. JSTOR 10.7722/j.ctt1kzccdr.
2. Townshend, Charles. "State and public security: Charles Townshend". The State: Historical and Political Dimensions. Routledge.
3. Martial Law in Poland Archived 2007-10-14 at the Wayback Machine (in Polish)
4. Nomikos, John, and Andrew Liaropoulos. "Truly Reforming or Just Responding to Failures? Lessons Learned from the Modernisation of the Greek National Intelligence Service". Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
5. Holland, Max (2006-08-21). "A Review of: "Krzysztof Persak and Lukasz Kaminski, editors:A Handbook of the Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe, 1944–1989"". International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. 19 (2): 365–367. doi:10.1080/08850600500483871. ISSN 0885-0607. S2CID 152510727.
6. Rozmowy kontrolowane at IMDb
7. Kruk, Dawid, Dagmara Mętel, and Andrzej Cechnicki. "A paradigm description of virtual reality and its possible applications in psychiatry". Postępy Psychiatrii i Neurologii= Advances in Psychiatry and Neurology.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
8. Haltof, Marek (1997). "Everything for sale: Polish national cinema after 1989". Canadian Slavonic Papers. 39 (1–2): 137–152. doi:10.1080/00085006.1997.11092147. ProQuest 274694186 – via ProQuest.
9. Cooke, Paul, Michael Eskin, and Karen Leeder. The Lives of Others' and Contemporary German Film. De Gruyter.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
10. Harper, Kate (2010). "Surveillance and Redemption in'The Lives of Others'". Screen Education. 59: 111.

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