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phill4paul
09-04-2014, 10:58 AM
Seventeen fake cellphone towers were discovered across the U.S. last week, according to a report in Popular Science.

Rather than offering you cellphone service, the towers appear to be connecting to nearby phones, bypassing their encryption, and either tapping calls or reading texts.

Les Goldsmith, the CEO of ESD America, used ESD's CryptoPhone 500 to detect 17 bogus cellphone towers. ESD is a leading American defense and law enforcement technology provider based in Las Vegas.

With most phones, these fake communication towers are undetectable. But not for the CryptoPhone 500, a customized Android device that is disguised as a Samsung Galaxy S III but has highly advanced encryption.

Goldsmith told Popular Science: " Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated. One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found eight different interceptors on that trip. We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.”

The towers were found in July, but the report implied that there may have been more out there.

Although it is unclear who owns the towers, ESD found that several of them were located near U.S. military bases.

"Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that's listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don't really know whose they are," Goldsmith said to Popular Science.

https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/mysterious-fake-cellphone-towers-intercepting-162645809.html

Ronin Truth
09-04-2014, 11:20 AM
Hmm? We've had a couple that just seemed to magically appear over night that no one seems to be able to identify or explain. I wonder.

Bite me NSA bastards! :p

phill4paul
09-04-2014, 11:25 AM
Hmm? We've had a couple that just seemed to magically appear over night that no one seems to be able to identify or explain. I wonder.

Bite me NSA bastards! :p

Might not be the NSA....


It's probably not the NSA — that agency can tap all it wants without the need for bogus towers, VentureBeat reported:

Not the NSA, cloud security firm SilverSky CTO/SVP Andrew Jaquith told us. “The NSA doesn’t need a fake tower,” he said. “They can just go to the carrier” to tap your line.

Ronin Truth
09-04-2014, 11:31 AM
Might not be the NSA.... OK, maybe not. I'll calm down. Now .......


Bite me NSA bastards! :p

donnay
09-04-2014, 11:36 AM
One Nation under Surveillance! :mad:

CPUd
09-04-2014, 11:39 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iupdjo5QyY


have phun:
http://opensignal.com/

mad cow
09-04-2014, 12:31 PM
have phun:
http://opensignal.com/

I have a 4G LTE modem/wireless router setup.It is my only connection to the internet.

Brian4Liberty
09-04-2014, 01:31 PM
Could be Chinese.

phill4paul
09-04-2014, 01:36 PM
Could be Chinese.


Interesting take. Why not? It sure seems that with all the government bureaucracy regarding transmissions that public records should be readily available.

jbauer
09-04-2014, 02:44 PM
This is USA gov. Just will remain to be seen who it is? Seems to me it would be easier for them to just back the existing towers though.

Dr.3D
09-04-2014, 03:06 PM
Seems like it would be simple enough to find the tower and who it belongs to. Shouldn't the land the tower is on be registered to an owner?

I know the tower near me has a fence around it and the name of the owner is on a tag that's attached to the fence. It even has a telephone number to call if you want to talk to them.

Ronin Truth
09-04-2014, 03:58 PM
Seems like it would be simple enough to find the tower and who it belongs to. Shouldn't the land the tower is on be registered to an owner?

I know the tower near me has a fence around it and the name of the owner is on a tag that's attached to the fence. It even has a telephone number to call if you want to talk to them. The ones I've seen are solid brick square tall structures with antenna crap on top. They are on the left and right sides of a bridge entrance over a river of a interstate highway. Very mysterious, spooky even. Booga, booga!

mad cow
09-04-2014, 04:12 PM
Seems like it would be simple enough to find the tower and who it belongs to. Shouldn't the land the tower is on be registered to an owner?

I know the tower near me has a fence around it and the name of the owner is on a tag that's attached to the fence. It even has a telephone number to call if you want to talk to them.

A good site for finding all towers near you and who owns or leases them.
http://www.antennasearch.com/sitestart.asp?sourcepagename=&getpagename=hopgsitemain&cmdrequest=getpage

Dr.3D
09-04-2014, 04:28 PM
A good site for finding all towers near you and who owns or leases them.
http://www.antennasearch.com/sitestart.asp?sourcepagename=&getpagename=hopgsitemain&cmdrequest=getpage
So why don't these folks who are wondering about the mysterious fake cellphone towers find out who owns them?

presence
09-04-2014, 04:30 PM
Ever notice Neo always used land line to exit The Matrix?

mad cow
09-04-2014, 04:45 PM
So why don't these folks who are wondering about the mysterious fake cellphone towers find out who owns them?

They maybe thinking about mobile antennas mounted on windowless vans,possibly with Free Candy painted on the side in order to disguise them.

Dr.3D
09-04-2014, 04:56 PM
They maybe thinking about mobile antennas mounted on windowless vans,possibly with Free Candy painted on the side in order to disguise them.
Well, the free candy van is mine. I would expect them to have a cleaners van with a zipper that can be unzipped so they can see out the side of the van.

Ronin Truth
09-04-2014, 05:12 PM
So why don't these folks who are wondering about the mysterious fake cellphone towers find out who owns them?

If the ones I see are a couple of them, I pass by them at 70 MPH.

Ronin Truth
09-04-2014, 05:16 PM
Ever notice Neo always used land line to exit The Matrix?
Yes, noticed.

idiom
09-04-2014, 07:05 PM
Mafia, makes more sense. An entity without serious access to fibre backbones.

Although Police can set up fake towers whenever they want. They have lil portable ones.

Ronin Truth
09-05-2014, 01:56 PM
Some additional info, not much.

http://money.msn.com/investing/post--mysterious-fake-cellphone-towers-found-across-us

devil21
09-05-2014, 03:37 PM
I think this article is about Stingray machines, not actual towers.

Stallheim
09-07-2014, 01:34 PM
CPUd and MadCow, i want to learn more about distributed crowd sourcing broadband access. I am sick of comcast and my ATT 3G is prohibitive as a hotspot. What options/opportunities are there for better broadband access?

Stallheim
09-09-2014, 04:40 PM
CPUd and MadCow, i want to learn more about distributed crowd sourcing broadband access. I am sick of comcast and my ATT 3G is prohibitive as a hotspot. What options/opportunities are there for better broadband access? anyone have info on this?

mad cow
09-09-2014, 05:23 PM
anyone have info on this?

Sorry for not replying earlier Stallheim,there are few people here who are as tech-illiterate here as I am,I was hoping one of them would jump in.

I have a wireless modem from Millenicom that talks to about 6 things in my house,mostly through a wireless Cradlepoint router.It is very fast,uses the Verizon network,works perfectly but is limited to 20 gigs/month and is not cheap per month.

It is a huge upgrade over the 3G-5 gigs/month plan I used for 5 years before this or the 56K phone modem I had before that,however.

http://millenicom.com

CPUd
09-09-2014, 05:48 PM
CPUd and MadCow, i want to learn more about distributed crowd sourcing broadband access. I am sick of comcast and my ATT 3G is prohibitive as a hotspot. What options/opportunities are there for better broadband access?

It depends on how well you get along with your neighbors. You can build what is called an ad-hoc mesh network, where maybe 10% of the neighborhood has a good solid broadband connection, and the rest of the neighborhood puts up an infrastructure for load balancing. You can take a regular wifi access point, whose range you may think of as radial, and replace an antenna so that it is directional. Years ago, people got creative with this, and made directional antennas out of soup cans:

http://i.imgur.com/uZC8HMO.jpg

But now there are plenty of places to find them online:
http://www.ampedwireless.com/products/ad14ex.html

The largest such network here in the US is probably Seattle Wireless, now almost 15 years old:
http://seattlewireless.net/

The same concept can be applied to mobile networks like 3G, some ad-hoc networks can mix and match.

To see how one is built from scratch, check this site, and be sure to read through the Green Book:
http://wndw.net/

phill4paul
09-18-2014, 04:36 PM
‘Interceptor’ cellphone towers found near White House, Senate

Mysterious “interceptor” cellphone towers that can listen in someone’s phone call despite not being part of any phone networks have turned up near the White House and Senate.

A company that specializes in selling secure mobile phones discovered the existence of several of the towers in and around the nation’s capitol.

“It’s highly unlikely that federal law enforcement would be using mobile interceptors near the Senate,” ESD America CEO Les Goldsmith told the technology website Venture Beat on Thursday.

The towers are also capable of loading spyware onto a mobile device before passing off a victim’s call to a legitimate network.

“My suspicion is that it is a foreign entity,” he told Venture Beat.

The reason Mr. Goldsmith doesn’t suspect U.S. agencies of placing the interceptors is that the federal government already has the capability of tapping directly into the carriers.


Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/18/several-interceptor-cell-towers-found-near-white-h/#ixzz3Di35P1Qs
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

devil21
09-18-2014, 05:11 PM
“It’s highly unlikely that federal law enforcement would be using mobile interceptors near the Senate,” ESD America CEO Les Goldsmith told the technology website Venture Beat on Thursday.

Ha! Mr. Goldsmith apparently isn't aware of what the NSA actually does in regular course of business. How else do you blackmail politicians and others if you can't steal their communications to find out what they're up to? One could parse the statement to mean that the NSA isn't a federal law enforcement agency however so it could be technically correct but materially would be bs.

NSA refuses to deny spying on Congress
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/04/the-nsa-refuses-to-deny-spying-on-members-of-congress/


"Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other elected officials?"

That's the question Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put to the National Security Agency's chief in a bluntly worded letter Friday. It seems, however, that the agency cannot categorically say no.