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> On one occasion the FBI didn't pay their bill, and New York Telephone billed the party being wiretapped

If the New York telephone didn't like what the FBI was doing, that's the most passive aggressive thing I've ever heard of.

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I remember a conspiracy theory that you could find out if your phone was tapped by not paying the bill. If the line still worked after you were delinquent, someone else was listening on it.

Kim Dotcom found out that his internet was being tapped by noticing the lag introduced in Call of Duty. He was #1 in the world at Call of Duty at one point.

This story is almost certainly bullshit, it’s hard to fuck up modern lawful intercept setups in a way that would introduce notable latency.

I would be inclined to agree, but admittedly if you had to route all the traffic to from NZ to a datacenter in the USA, then back to the game server, that could introduce notable latency.

If you want to actively MITM it, sure. If you just want to send a copy of everything to the USA, then it needn't slow down the original connection at all.

If you need the content of messages sent within COD, then you need to MITM it. Game companies archive that stuff now, but they didn't used to.

That’s really not how LI ever works. The data would be collected in NZ and then later shared.

I'm just repeating the news report. It does sound a little suspicious, but there seems to be some evidence in the report.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/suspicion-over-dotcom-net-glit...

The technical description just doesn’t make sense

> The data showed the internet signal had previously taken two steps before going offshore - but was now taking five.

> Information held by the Herald shows Gen-I studied data showing the amount of time it took information on the internet connection to reach the Xbox server. It went from 30 milliseconds to 180 milliseconds - a huge increase for online gamers.

There’s just no realistic way that bouncing the connection around New Zealand would introduce a ~100ms delay. It sounds like he just started getting bad routes to the gameserver, which is par for the course for Oceania, but unlikely to result from LI.

Could the bad routes to the gameserver be a possible accidental side effect of the intercept?

Maybe the people doing the intercept made a mistake. It sounds like they made a legal mistake, so maybe a technical mistake isn't that far fetched either.

A route with latencies like this suggests the traffic bouncing through another country, I can’t imagine LI causing that.

Intercepts aren’t hard, it’s a feature built into regular ISP hardware.

I’d guess this was just a separate, unrelated routing error.

That ended up as a plot point in The Wire.

I've never researched it, it's too good to prove wrong. It does seem pretty plausible though, the cops and/or judge that ordered monitoring it would be pretty annoyed if it got cut off.

More recently in Logan Lucky too- the main character determines he's no longer a suspect when his mobile finally stops working.

There is a Russian anecdote: to raise the quality of a phone call one could say just 3 magic words: "Moscow, metro, bomb".

I think what they disliked was not getting paid.

The federal government is notorious for paying its suppliers years behind schedule.

"Passive aggressive" is exactly how you expect people to behave when you force them to do things they don't particularly want to do -- and follow this up by not paying them for it.

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