How can Dems win 2006 elections if they can't trust their phones?

[Cyrano]

Given Bush's disregard for any laws, what's to stop him from bugging the phone calls of each and every Democrat (and their aides) running for office this year?

It's virtually impossible to run a campaign without the use of telephones. Does anyone believe Rove hasn't already thought of this?

[necso]

1. There's really no such thing as

completely secure communications (that is, conveying something to another). -- The other could always "talk".

It's a question of how much confidence you can have in the parties, the means, the location and the other circumstances of communication. (And there is miscommunication to complicate things.)

But never trust a damn phone. Carefully controlled hard copy (treat it like it was classified info), FTF, stuff like that is best, at least for most important information. (The Battle of the Bulge achieved surprise because Hitler used couriers -- and because we were sleeping.)

And one should plant good disinformation via various means. If you can subtly feed the others what you suspect that they want to hear -- and that they won't verify carefully because of this -- you can have some real impact.

If you're good, you can sit in a bugged room, communicate one thing via, say, paper and hold a misleading conversation by saying something (entirely) different. There is also multiple entendre (commonly double entendre), where the variously informed take different meanings (as per their individual knowledge and understandings) -- and the completely uninformed take another. (Of course, some, or all, of the multiple meanings may eventually be decoded by those who did not, or could not, at first. But if you do it well, there will always be ambiguity -- and one can retreat behind this ambiguity to maintain one's "innocence", even when the hidden meanings are found out.)

It's tradecraft -- and it's useful for anyone important now.