I think cell antennas have unique identifiers. If true, can you detect when you connect to a tower that isn't your usual tower in your usual geographic location (assuming you're being targeted at home, for example).
And if there is indeed a unique id, can the fake cell take the id of a real cell and still work with the cellphone company, or would it need the cooperation of the cellphone company? (for example, the cell company would look at hops?)
I guess it's too much to hope that the cellphone companies would try to protect our privacy.
Maybe someday we'll have police running things similar to license scanners but for cellphone conversations. They'll drive around the city recording conversations to detect keywords for illegal activity (herb, drug, murder of crows, etc)
EDIT: actually, I don't think they need to hijack cellphone connections. They can just listen in - at least they used to be able to. We determined the identities of the bombers of our embassies in Africa in the late-90s through cellphone conversations through RC-135s flying along the Africa coast from Diego Garcia, and an intelligence gathering satellite that drags an antenna behind it.
GSM contains half-baked kludge to make passive tracking of phones impractical. Phone transmits it's IMSI only when network asks it to (eg. when connecting to network) and then uses random session identifier ("TMSI") for normal traffic. So if you want to reliably identify and track particular phone or subscriber without assistance from network, you have to actively MitM the network.
And if there is indeed a unique id, can the fake cell take the id of a real cell and still work with the cellphone company, or would it need the cooperation of the cellphone company? (for example, the cell company would look at hops?)
I guess it's too much to hope that the cellphone companies would try to protect our privacy.
Maybe someday we'll have police running things similar to license scanners but for cellphone conversations. They'll drive around the city recording conversations to detect keywords for illegal activity (herb, drug, murder of crows, etc)
EDIT: actually, I don't think they need to hijack cellphone connections. They can just listen in - at least they used to be able to. We determined the identities of the bombers of our embassies in Africa in the late-90s through cellphone conversations through RC-135s flying along the Africa coast from Diego Garcia, and an intelligence gathering satellite that drags an antenna behind it.