Snoop City : With the flick of a switch, your phone call is no longer private. Drug deals, wild sex--the secrets of raw life. It’s all part of the new world of reality entertainment.

The small black box John holds in his hand emits snippets of dialogue interspersed with bursts of static and long periods of silence. Someone speaks Tagalog. There’s a conversation in Spanish, some chatter in English about what to do this Friday night.

John, a 30-year-old L.A.-based musician, is frustrated. He knows there’s better stuff out there. Finally, as he cruises down a condo-lined street, the box begins crackling. Pay dirt. “Ooh, baby, yeah, harder, harder,” coos a female voice. A male voice talks a blue streak, followed by moans and exclamations. “Wow,” John says, after the 900 line conversation runs its course. “Wasn’t that something?”

Many people are unaware that with the push of a button, eavesdroppers like John tune into their phone conversations, listening to and taping an unpredictable, ever-changing world of “reality entertainment.” We’re talking drug deals, domestic strife, wild sex and, to be sure, hours and hours of human interaction as mundane and boring as only real, raw life can be. And, as on today’s hottest shows, the participants in these dramas are not professional actors but ordinary people.

The E-ticket into this reality theme park is a scanner--a computerized radio that can pick up a broad range of the radio spectrum. Some of these, such as the one John carries, are as small as a walkie-talkie. Other, more powerful units come in desktop size. Sold at electronics stores for $100 and more, these can be used to hone in on frequencies set aside for police, fire and ambulance transmissions.

Scanners can also listen in on cordless and cellular phone calls and even baby monitors since these, too, transmit radio signals. With millions of scanners out there--with a pickup radius that varies from 100 feet to a few city blocks--somebody within the range of your telephone may be listening in.

“That’s the trouble with wireless communication,” says Ted Rappaport, professor of electrical engineering at Virginia Tech’s Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group. “When you transmit a signal, it will go anywhere radio waves propagate--usually no more than a range of five to 10 miles.” Rappaport, who consults on security issues, says the propagation of these waves makes the people who converse on cordless phones vulnerable to radio predators such as John.

The scanner hit the public eye in 1993, when a slew of tabloids and magazines published the racy transcripts of a mobile phone conversation between Prince Charles and his married mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, that was picked up on a scanner and recorded. The tapes had hecklers chortling over such unprincely declarations as Charles’ now famous desire to be reincarnated as Camilla’s tampon.

“There have been lots of cases of this,” Rappaport says. Law enforcement agencies were able to track down superhacker Kevin Mitnick by monitoring cellular traffic. And the same technology that is available to the police and FBI can be employed by the corporate spy. “In California,” Rappaport says, “I heard cases of would-be investors monitoring cellular traffic to pick up stock tips.”

Earlier this year, New York magazine reported that the original manuscript of a heavily expurgated story on International Creative Management that ran in the August 1995 issue of Spy magazine included the accusation that agent Elizabeth Rieger used a scanner to listen to cell phone conversations. Rieger told New York that “Everyone in L.A. has a spy radio.” When contacted for this story, Rieger, now an editor at Ticketmaster’s LIVE magazine, declined to comment.

There is a complicated web of state and federal laws covering scanners, but the rules, in short, are these: It is illegal to profit from any information gleaned from a scanner (including emergency bands) unless the transmission, such as regular radio or shortwave broadcasts, is meant for public dissemination.

Listening to cellular calls is illegal, but eavesdropping on cordless is OK--basically because it was the cellular industry that pressured Congress. Until the year before last, any scanner purchased over the counter could scan an uninterrupted range of frequencies. Then, following lobbying pressure, Congress passed a law requiring any scanner sold in this country to block the 800 to 900 megahertz range--the frequencies used by cellular phones and their relay towers.

“Effective April 26, 1994, manufacturers could no longer produce or import scanning receivers that are capable of tuning in to cellular bands,” says Julius Knapp, chief of the Federal Communication Commission’s Equipment Authorization Unit. Cordless phone frequencies, 45 to 49 megahertz, aren’t covered by the ban. Also, Knapp adds, “There was no restriction on sale of the existing inventories, so I would expect that there is still some sort of full-range equipment sold.”

Indeed, no sooner did the law pass than the buying frenzy began. Electronic stores snapped up as many lots of pre-cell-ban scanners they could get, knowing they were now hot commodities.

“Everybody wanted to have them,” recalls Mario A. Manti-Gualtiero, a sales representative at Eagle Electronics, a Glendale electronics retailer. “We were selling them at a normal pace and when they discontinued them, we ran an ad that said that these radios can no longer be manufactured due to the frequency range that they pick up and they started selling like crazy.” Today, pre-ban units are still available at some electronics stores, through the classifieds, over the Internet and via mail order.

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But even cellular-blocked equipment won’t stop a determined scanner. Any issue of Popular Communications or Monitoring Times, two magazines catering to the scanning enthusiast, is filled with ads offering not only cellular-capable scanners, but modifications of incapable ones. Internet newsgroups and electronics manuals are also a source for cellular-capable scanners and modification information.

“It’s absolutely impossible to prevent the modification of a scanner to receive cellular,” says Bob Grove, publisher of Monitoring Times and president of Grove Enterprises, which sells and modifies radio scanners. “In many cases, it’s only keyboard strokes on your scanner. The scanner has keys on the front. It’s a programming technique and some of them can be done that way.”

Grove estimates that there are 10 million to 15 million scanner owners in the United States, and of those, “fewer than 10% listen to cellular.” Many of them, Grove believes, are “shut-ins with limited avenues of entertainment.”

Although most people find the idea of such wanton disregard for privacy abhorrent, Grove believes the anti-scanning laws are predicated on an unreasonable expectation of privacy.

“The question becomes who is really responsible for the protection of a private conversation,” he says. “If you walk out on the sidewalk naked you can’t say it’s an invasion of privacy if people look at you. Similarly, if you were talking on a phone in an airport concourse, you can’t expect people to stick their fingers in their ears. The analogy is, if you’re radiating a radio signal in the clear, without any form of scrambling, you can’t expect people who are tuning through the spectrum to jump over just to avoid it.”

Because it’s simple--though not legal--to tape calls off a scanner, cellular phone tapes are now a hot commodity in the audio underground where they are copied and disseminated around the country.

“It hasn’t been prepackaged for you. It’s like a total dose of reality,” says “Brother Russell,” the nom de plume of the creator of “Austin Cellular Calls,” a collection of calls taped in Austin, Texas.

The conversations were all taped with simple recording equipment between midnight and 3 a.m., a time Russell believes yields the best material. Some of the horrific real dialogue on Russell’s tapes comes from a conference call between some employees at a mental institution who admit to roughing up patients and then writing on their charts that the injuries had been caused by accidents.

“It’s real interesting to listen to the stream of information, and, based on what you decide to save on tape and what you edit down, it can give you a weird view of humanity,” says the creator of another underground tape called “Satanic Cell Call Tapes.” These recordings, made in Northern California, are mostly ugly or obscene exchanges between the sexes. In one, a couple converses in baby-talk voices, which builds to a sexual crescendo. Another captures the abusive exchange between a divorced couple.

While taping and reproducing this material is illegal, the relatively small, noncommercial distribution of tapes in the underground has not triggered enforcement.

Cellular phone scanning reaches its artistic apogee in the work of British experimental music artist Robin Rimbaud, whose CDs are released under the name Scanner. Since 1992, Scanner has released numerous CDs that contain textured ambient music interspersed with cellular phone conversations. This commercial release is legal in England.

“The scanner device provides an anonymous window into reality, allowing you to cut and paste information to structure an alternative vernacular,” Rimbaud says. “Whether it’s eavesdropping on an illicit affair, a liaison with a prostitute, a drug deal or a simple discussion of ‘What’s for dinner?’ all exist within an indiscriminate ocean of digital signals flying overhead, but not beyond our reach.” The Scanner manifesto, Rimbaud says, “is to take tiny fragments from this debris, to try to make some sense of it.”

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There are a few signs that the days of legal cellular phone scanners may be coming to an end, at least in the United States. The FCC’s Knapp says the agency is looking into closing a loophole that allows companies to modify scanners to receive cellular.

“If a company is performing the modifications, we would probably consider the second company to be a new manufacturer and treat them like they are manufacturing a new piece of equipment that is in violation of the law,” he says.

If the law does not discourage electronic snooping, new telecommunications technology will. While scrambling devices have been available for years, these were attractive only to individuals and industries that dealt with sensitive information or the ultra-paranoid, since both parties in a conversation would need one and the equipment was available only at significant extra cost. Now, the cellular industry is introducing a new type of technology called Spread Spectrum, which seems to solve the problem of eavesdroppers cheaply and efficiently.

“What we’re doing is taking a conversation and breaking it down and sending it over multiple channels,” says Dave Daniels, director of corporate fraud management for AirTouch Cellular. “It’s like an instant puzzle that comes back together.”

The industry is not so much concerned with caller privacy. Daniels says the cellular providers do not guarantee it and, like cordless phone manufacturers, they warn customers that their conversations may be electronically overheard.

Their problem is with a more complicated form of high-tech high jinks--theft of cellular phone codes. By hooking a scanner up to a computer, it is possible to unscramble the identification codes (which are also transmitted by the telephone), allowing a person to illegally help himself to free cellular phone time. Spread Spectrum, Daniels says, foils the cell ID number criminal as well as the prankster.

Monitoring Times’ Grove agrees. “I know of no one who has successfully intercepted them,” he says. Still, it will take a while for this new technology to supplant the old-style telephones, and until that happens, people will be vulnerable to the Electronic Age equivalent of the champagne glass against the wall.

In the meantime, Grove warns cell phone users: “Do not discuss private matters. Don’t give credit card numbers, your schedule away from the home or any information that you wouldn’t mind the public knowing because the public is probably listening.”