Rep. Ted Lieu Calls For Cellphone Hacking Investigation After ’60 Minutes’ Segment

On Sunday, 60 Minutes took a year-old segment on phone hacking that it shot and aired in Australia, mixed it up with other old hacks from last year’s Def Con and repackaged it for American viewers. But just about everyone panicked. “Hacking Your Phone” set off a shock that raged through headlines and social media. As the miasmic cherries on top, the episode also freaked out California Rep. Ted Lieu (D), who has called for a congressional investigation.

The segment based its hysteria on a hole in phone-routing protocol SS7 (Signaling System 7) which connects phone carriers worldwide and allows cellphone users to transmit information from text messages to bank account numbers, and also a flaw which, incidentally, isn’t easy to exploit.

The SS7 network hacking bit had reporter Sharyn Alfonsi and 60 Minutes traveling to Germany to seek out “the best hackers in the world” for an SS7 hacking demo. For this, they provided US Rep. Ted Lieu (D–California.) with an iPhone and the researchers were filmed recording his conversations (with permission).

Lieu said that when he showed up to tape the segment in Washington, the hackers had told producers which hotel he’d stayed at the night before.

“It was really creepy that they knew where I was even though the GPS was turned off,” he said by phone on Monday.

Throughout the episode, 60 Minutes Australia repeated its claim that this demo of tracking and call interception using SS7 “has never been shown before.” Demonstrations included listening to calls, intercepting email and spying on users with a smartphone’s built-in camera.

While a hole in phone-routing protocol is a serious problem, it’s the kind of hacking that is costly in many ways, and so is used only to go after specific high-profile or information-rich targets, by entities with resources and privileges. The show cautioned viewers that they could be hacked and tracked from anywhere, concluding with a sinister warning that we now live in a world where technology can’t be trusted and that at any moment they could unknowingly become victims to some person in a dark basement tracking their location and listening to their calls, thanks to his unregulated access to SS7.