• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 hours ago

    Wait, people didn’t know about StingRays?

    They’ve been around for like a decade now.

    But uh, yeah, basically, they’re fake/spoof/honeypot cell towers that man-in-the-middle all nearby cell network traffic.

    This is how they do the whole… everything dragnet, all the time, basically all cop cruisers have them in them, active all the time, this is why you just don’t bring your phone to a protest unless you really know what you’re doing.

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        It’s a little less about reading what you’re saying or looking at on your phone, it’s mostly about tracking where your phone goes and figuring out who you are that way.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 hours ago

        They don’t really need to.

        They get all your phone’s metadata, and thats usually enough to plug in to a bunch of other databases that they can add you to a watchlist of some kind.

        I mean really at this point we are all in a giganto mega watchlist, its just that its so big that the problem is actually sorting through that list and ‘accurately’ assigning threat levels, but thats what Palantir is for.

        Like, they get your IMSI code, unless you are somehow regularly/randomly resetting that, uh, they can easily get a bunch of other info from cell providers, they just can’t (usually) specifically use that info alone to convict you of something, but…

        They know who you are, roughly where you were and when.

        So thats a pretty good starting point for a subsequent investigation, or just throwing it onto the dragnet data pile.