Cellular Scrambler Phone

You’ve probably seen those old movies where an informant calls the police with some information. In order to disguise his voice, the man covers the speaker with a piece of cloth. That was probably one of the first few ways of ‘scrambling’ one’s voice. Of course given the advances of modern technology, it might seem almost laughable now.

These days mobile phones are as commonplace as any other device. But the requirement of being able to talk securely over a phone continues to exist especially when certain people deal with sensitive information which they do want anyone else to be privy to. Typically these are people working for government agencies or businesses dealing with very sensitive information. Thus even a conversation could be of immense value to military or industrial spies.

A cellular scrambler phone is one of the security measures that most of the above mentioned people use to prevent anyone from eavesdropping on their conversation. Speech inversion was the most common method of scrambling one’s speech. Simply speaking, the signal would be inverted or turned inside out and thus would become scrambled. Being a relatively uncomplicated method, the speech inversion process was also the cheapest form of scrambling.

A cellular scrambler phone works like a regular mobile phone but contains technology which encodes or scrambles the content sent from one end and then decodes or unscrambles it at the other end. In the digital arena the process of encryption is used whereas in the analog domain, scrambling is the method.

These days a combination of both processes is used in the making of a cellular scrambler phone. These phones now incorporate a digitizer which converts the initially scrambled voice into an encrypted digital signal. The process is then reversed at the receiver’s end to enable them to understand the communication.

The origin of the earliest voice scramblers goes as far back as the pre World War II days. Bell Labs was the first company to manufacture such devices. It was primarily used to send and receive secure communication during war time. Scrambling is widely used today in communication done via satellite, radio and landline-based modems.