Fake Cell Towers Monitoring Calls and Texts

[warpus]

I wouldn't be surprised if these towers are constructed in the event of an emergency. Say there is some sort of an armed uprising and/or civil unrest in the United States, for whatever reason. Say people are trying to communicate so that they can gather and coordinate their actions.

It could be good for the government to have a bunch of towers in such a scenario that are external to the whole cell phone tower network.. I'm not saying it necessarily would be, I don't know anything about cellphone towers, but in terms of infrastructure this just smells a bit like some sort of a backup thing, or something meant to complement the existing infrastructure in ways we don't understand. Something like that could come in very handy during an extreme crisis, where existing infrastructure might be compromised. The American military and intelligence agencies have a lot of money.. and they like to plan for contingencies. I think this might be one of those contingency plans.

And hey, for now they get to use it to spy on people, or whatever. Win/win

I really think that the Arab spring and other recent uprisings have taught the American intelligence dudes quite a bit. They are ready to face a large scale social media organized citizen revolt and/or unrest. They are ready or they are getting ready. If stuff goes down, they'll bust out some toys.

 

[brennan]

He never claimed his OS will be able to stop interceptors, only that it will notify you when your encryption has been turned off

Why can't his OS stop interceptors?

What are the possibilities here? That he's too inept to program an OS that can't have its encryption turned off or that there's something about going down to 2G that means you can't use encryption? The former casts doubt on his expertise, the latter, you'll notice suggests no hacking is going on here at all, the towers are just obsolete technology on which you cannot use encryption (although i've no idea why that would be the case - insufficient bandwidth perhaps?) - which would imply he's just scaremongering.

 

[Zelig]

Why can't his OS stop interceptors?

What are the possibilities here? That he's too inept to program an OS that can't have its encryption turned off or that there's something about going down to 2G that means you can't use encryption? The former casts doubt on his expertise, the latter, you'll notice suggests no hacking is going on here at all, the towers are just obsolete technology on which you cannot use encryption (although i've no idea why that would be the case - insufficient bandwidth perhaps?) - which would imply he's just scaremongering.

It's not an OS feature.

Seriously, you're asking why Windows can't make your printer print in colour when it's out of cyan.

 

[brennan]

Pretend i'm an idiot, please. How is the lack of an essential physical component for a physical task equivalent to making a piece of electronics that can do a certain form of data processing unable to do that processing any more?

What exactly is preventing the phone from encrypting and why can this not be prevented?

 

[peter grimes]

Why can't his OS stop interceptors?

Because the OS doesn't have access to the chip (called the baseband processor) doing the low level radio communication. The OS basically just says to the chip "dial this number". The baseband processor is the thing that actually generates the commands and specific pattern of radio pulses that go out through the antenna to the tower. The tower, on its end, has to send certain commands back to the mobile phone. These stingray towers are sending something that causes the chip to stop running encryption.

The Cryptophone is able to detect that this has happened and warns you, tho it can't do anything to stop the tower from issuing those interrupts.

Though the standard Apple and Android phones showed nothing wrong, the baseband firewall on the Cryptophone set off alerts showing that the phone’s encryption had been turned off, and that the cell tower had no name – a telltale sign of a rogue base station. Standard towers, run by say, Verizon or T-Mobile, will have a name, whereas interceptors often do not.

The original PopSci article has those details.

 

[brennan]

Thank you Peter.

 

[classical_hero]

Basically we have to assume someone is listening on the other end besides the intended person.

 

[peter grimes]

You should always assume that, though.