It’s kind of unclear from the article where this claim even comes from. Was this something the journalist claimed to somehow know or was it something that the

It’s kind of unclear from the article where this claim even comes from. Was this something the journalist claimed to somehow know or was it something that the PIRA had told him? Neither of them would be in a position to know especially at the time it was written, but it has all the hallmarks of the kind of “the enemy is 10ft tall” stories that tend to turn up in the fog of war. The next part of that quote (in the article) though certainly suggests that the PIRA had perfectly good evidence to suggest that SOMETHING like this was happening based on their experience of actively manipulating it to their advantage. It sounds reasonable as a concept without having to back up the specific technical claims of how the monitoring itself actually worked or it’s particular capabilities. I could for example see it as something much closer to a manual operation IRL that just targeted the phones of know and suspected members along with payphones in certain areas and it would have appeared the same way to them. They weren’t actually a particularly large organisation IRL and those passing operational messages over a public phone network was even smaller. I’d hazard a guess that it’s not actually THAT difficult to put together a target list for surveillance that would narrow the scope down to something fairly reasonable. You aren’t actually looking for full coverage in this scenario you’re looking for a good signal to noise ratio and it ends up becoming a question of which calls are “unusual” and you could get a long way to answering with metadata alone, long before you ever thought to pass the actual contents of the call to an analyst.