Mobile Phone Hacking?

Mobile phones are everywhere these days.Everybody has one, some have one for business and one for social use. This allows one to be switched off to get away from the office, so to speak. But just how easy is it, for a person to listen to and/or receive other folks conversations and text messages?  Actually it is very, very, simple indeed, from easy cheap methods to medium hard methods requiring some expenditure, to extremely high tech  costing billions!!  Here are some that I know about and it is by no means all of them.
Easy Ones.
If you can get access to the phone you want to tap, then you remove the sim card, put in a blank one and switch it on and off. The phone will then re-enter stuff on the blank sim card. Replace the original and put the new sim card into another body. You then have a cloned phone. if the person's one rings, so does your clone. cost £5 for a spare sim. But you don't know where folks are, you only get messages. So spend a bit.............
Medium Ones
Again, if you can get the sim out the phone you can buy a little machine, which will copy and retain details, from which you can make a load of sims. You just keep a spare phone and change the sims round. Google it for prices.
To find out where a person is, you can join up a kids protection site and for a very small fee, you enter the phone number and up comes a map and exact address. They don't care who the number belongs to, they just want their 30 pence a time!!! You then go there, to the location and do the sim clone thing.
For about £100 you can buy a hand held scanner, which will pick up mobiles in the immediate area and latch on to the strongest signal. The better the Ariel the better the range. By taking off the stubby one and hooking up your tv one on the roof  of a house you can get great range. These scanners will also pick up the police, aicraft and many other broadcasters.
A parabolic microphone pointed at a mobile can pick up the conversation, some distance away. Some expensive ones look like rifles. You can listen or record. By putting a program into a phone, it can be used as a broadcaster even when switched off!! Recently there was a story about businessmen putting phones in buiscuit tins at meetings to stop them broadcasting.  Actually the tin vibrates and acts as a broadcaster too!! If a webcam is left connected to a computer, it too, can be switched on by planting a program it the computer, perhaps tacked onto an email or just put in via a memory stick. Memory sticks can take out whole address books from a computer, to be transferred to another one and looked at for Tony's,Jill or Fred's numbers.
A handsfree phone,used at home, will broadcast everything in a room, if a small program is entered. Or it may just be listened to with a scanner, while in use. Each microwave item is allotted a frequency range to work in, so it is a simple matter to scan up and down the range for the product. The only way to defeat it is to take out the battery all the time, including your walk about phone at home. Your incoming messages are on the service provider's computer awaiting you collecting them. Why do you think that they all go flat, even when not in use? Each unit continually pulses out an I am here and an I'm free/not free message which need power.
High Tech
The  phone pushes out I'm free to a satellite, in the sky, which relays the signals coming up from other places to go back down to you and vice versa. It may come from a landline station or a mobile station. If you use one company for your mobile and the receiver uses a different one then the signal bounces all over the place.
You dial the number, it goes to your providers sat then for billing purposes,then up to broadcast to the receivers sat and down to them. Landlines go through telephone lines, to a ground station and then up to a sat and onward.Due to the Earth being kinda round each company needs three or four sats to bounce signals round the World.
Every single journey can be intercepted by a huge receiving dish and all calls bouncing round can be listened too and the locations found for both the sender and receiver. This costs gazzillons and is a spook job, mainly.
Every single message by mobile, landline, text, telex, fax e mail  I.M.satphone and webcam going into the uSA is recorded!!  Skype say that they have refused to give the spooks their entry codes but.............well.......
They can also listen and locate any number anywhere on Earth via tracking stations. All is recorded and a word sifting program is used to read for bomb explosion and so on.  This message then goes to a human to look at and leave alone or send out an enquiry for more intel. Flooding them drives them nuts!!
The vibration of glass in a window pane can be transposed into a message with the proper kit. Hand over the mouth don't help much either as the vibration of the voices, may be read.  Running water helps and music. But it can be filtered out by high tech machines. Everything vibrates at a frequency and each frequency can be skinned off to leave a clean message
There is a wonderful way round it in the e. mail system. You can type out instructions and save them to draft. You then pass on the entry codes to the e mail account. Another comes in, reads and deletes, thus saying all received. As nothing was every sent, then nothing can be recorded. Of course, by putting a keylogger program into a machine, it sends out which keys were tapped and in which order, all time signatured.  Saves the old eyesight, from having to use a telescope to watch fingers do the walking !!!
I am no expert, these are pretty general plays being used. I am sure that there are many more. Please e.mail me or comment and I get them out there in a post. Forewarned is forearmed