[dkersten]

I used to work on anti-fraud software for SMS and we had VPN access to a lot of the installed hardware.

I'd be more worried about an employee leaking data. Most telcos have many many employees and a carefully planned leak would be difficult to detect and prevent. In one installation I was involved in, we had access to all SMS messages in the system, in realtime, before the recipients got them. It would have been pretty easy to copy them to a memory stick and then leak them sometime later.

[tekacs]

Compartmentalisation in intelligence is rather more established and effective than in private sector companies, to the best of my knowledge, though.