Is your cell phone bugged?

Listen up. This is important information. Whether it's corporate spying (ala HP) or your government listening in because you might be discussing terrorism, or your girlfriend is curious how you're spending your time when you're not with her, or your kids are up to something and you want to find out....bugging cell phones is easy.

Here's a good article to read about how to KNOW if your phone is bugged (via Lauren Weinstein's Blog)

First, when the phone is operating as a bug, regular calls can't be taking place in almost all cases. A well designed bug program could try to minimize the obviousness of this by quickly dropping the bug call if the phone owner tried to make an outgoing call, or drop the bug connection if an incoming call tried to ring through. But if the bug is up and running, that's the only transmission path that is available on the phone at that time for the vast majority of currently deployed cell phones.

New "3G" phones have the capability of running very high speed data -- in which additional voice channels could be simultaneously transmitted at full speed along with the primary call (conventional GSM data channels -- GPRS/EDGE -- typically block calls while actively transmitting or receiving user data). But this is pretty bleeding-edge stuff for now, and not an issue for the vast majority of current phones, especially in the U.S. at this time.

Of course, if a cell phone is being used as a remote bug, the odds are that the routine conversations through that phone are also being monitored, right? So this "one call at a time" aspect isn't as much of a limitation to bugging as might otherwise be expected.