Are you sick of being traced over the phones by the FBI? Do you long for a time when you can order around your worthless henchmen without fear of being traced back to your secret island lair? Then the Aqua Box is for you! The Aqua Box is any device that you can make in your own home that will keep the FBI from tracing you! Hurray!

How an FBI Lock-in Trace works

The FBI lock-in trace keeps a caller from hanging up their phone, so that they can use their fancy FBI stuff to find out your physical location. The 1st thing the FBI does is tap into your conversation, much like a 3 way call. Phone connections are held open by a certain amount of voltage, normally produced by the phone. To end a call, you depress the little handle thing on the phone, which tells the phone to stop emitting the voltage. The FBI can keep your phone connection open by pumping in voltage from a nifty FBI machine. Even if you hang up, the line will remain open, and your phone will ring. It doesn't matter if you pick up or not, as long as the line is open, they will trace (and capture) you.

How to Escape the FBI's Lock-in Trace

To escape from the FBI's Lock-in Trace, you have to drain the extra voltage from your phone line so that the line will close, thereby keeping you (and your island lair) safe from the clutches of the law. The Aqua box is any device that plugs into your phone line and, when turned on, sucks the voltage out of the phone line, thereby closing the line and keeping you from being traced. All you have to do is connect the prongs of a device to the two wires in the phone jack. A good idea would be to have a switch system hooked up with your device, so that if anyone turns it on when you are not being traced by the FBI, nothing bad will happen. A light bulb is enough to drain the voltage from the line, but you might want to hook up two or three light bulbs just to be safe.

When to Use it

Do not use it unless absolutely necessary. Draining power out of the phone lines is not a good thing, it will most likely fry whatever phones or (infinitely worse) modems and computers plugged into the phone line. If you suspect the FBI is on to you, calmly hang up the phone and turn on your device. If you have a switch installed, you might want to turn that on too. This will most likely cause damage to stuff plugged into your phone lines. I cannot emphasize that more. Do not do this just for kicks. Only use this technique when you are being lock-in traced by the FBI. If you are wanted by the FBI, I wish you the best of luck in running across the country.

The lock-in trace, if it ever existed, is now completely obsolete.

The digital switching systems that have been in use since the 1980s no longer allow current to be passed directly from the calling party to the called, or vice versa. Rather, the switch converts each side of the conversation into PCM-encoded digital audio information, multiplexes and compresses it, and sends it to the receiving switch which demuxes and decompresses the audio. Thus, any voltage passed down the line will not translate into an equivalent voltage at the other end that can keep the line open - the switches filter out all audio that falls outside of their programmed audio range.

If a call is traced using modern systems, everything is handled by the switch's internal logging mechanisms. There is no need to physically introduce a ring signal into the line to find out where it terminates - the switch can tell its operator what calls are being made from your line and to whom, and can look up the corresponding information to reveal who originated the offending phone call.