Phone security.

The big Murdoch scandal in Britain has underlined the fact that cellphones and even land line phones with cordless receivers are nowhere near as secure as old fashioned telephones, because everything is broadcast into the air waves. There is really no need to "hack" anyone's cellphone. If you know the radio frequencies of cellphone towers and have plenty of recording capability, as most news gathering organizations do, you can listen to every cellphone call(in-coming or out-going) a person has near a specific tower or set of towers. With the proper radio you can listen to random cell phone calls all day. In the US, as far as I know, it's not illegal to listen to someone else's cellphone calls, although it is illegal to record them or in any way misuse or pass along information you've heard from a call that isn't yours.

There can be, of course, hundreds of phone calls using the same cellphone tower at once, so that chances of a single call being intercepted by smaller-time criminals than some of Murdoch's emplyees are slight. But I would advise everyone to treat the phone as an insecure method of communication with all that means these days.