The beauty of a digital mobile phone, as opposed to the analogue mobile phones still used by some people in Australia, is that a conversation is reasonably secure from eavesdroppers. If I call you on my digital mobile, our conversation will be encrypted with the A5 encryption algorithm between the mobile phone and the exchange. The carrier has copies of the Kis and, in some countries, the government can access these copies. They are, however, closely guarded secrets. SKiMo had access to the database of the encrypted Kis and access to some of the unencrypted Kis themselves. At the time, he never went to the trouble of gathering enough information about the A3 and A8 algorithms to decrypt the full database, though it would have been easy to do so. However, he has now obtained that information. To SKiMo, access to the keys generated for each of thousands of German mobile phone conversations was simply a curiosity--and a trophy. He didn't have the expensive equipment required to eavesdrop. To an intelligence agency, however, access could be very valuable, particularly if some of those phones belonged to people such as politicians. Even more valuable would be ongoing access to the OMC, or better still, the MSC. SkiMo said he would not provide this to any intelligence agency. While inside DeTeMobil, SKiMo also learned how to interpret some of the mapping and signal-strength data. The result? If one of the company's customers has his mobile turned on, SKiMo says he can pinpoint the customer's geographic location to within one kilometre. The customer doesn't even have to be talking on the mobile. All he has to do is have the phone turned on, waiting to receive calls. SKiMo tracked one customer for an afternoon, as the man travelled across Germany, then called the customer up. It turned out they spoke the same European language. `Why are you driving from Hamburg to Bremen with your phone on stand-by mode?' SKiMo asked. The customer freaked out. How did this stranger at the end of the phone know where he had been travelling? SKiMo said he was from Greenpeace. `Don't drive around so much. It creates pollution,' he told the bewildered mobile customer. Then he told the customer about the importance of conserving energy and how prolonged used of mobile phones affected certain parts of one's brain. Originally, SKiMo broke into the mobile phone carriers' network because he wanted `to go completely cellular'--a transition which he hoped would make him both mobile and much harder to trace. Being able to eavesdrop on other people's calls-- including those of the police--was going to be a bonus.