To facilitate listening to cell phone conversations, the NSA and GCHQ hacked the world wide supplier of SIM cards and stole the encryption keys used to secure cell phone communications between handsets and the vendor's backbone.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/19/great-sim-heist/ That way they didn't need to make any awkward requests for authority to eavesdrop or leave any other trace of their activities, they just record the communications to/from the handset of interest off the air and use the vendor's secret keys to decrypt the contents at their leisure. They also decided to hack into the administrative computers at the cell phone carriers so they could erase any suspicious charges from the customer's bill. -- rec --
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