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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

We've been hearing about Stingrays so much I wondered what the average Joe can do to avoid 'em.

This is about the only thing I found, but it's promising for the long term -- http://secupwn.github.io/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector/ -- note that they list themselves as still in alpha and to expect false indications.

I think the typical advice I've heard -- turning off your phone or turning off the baseband functionality is pretty impractical for most folks.

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Somewhere on my todo is "wire pager to cell phone", I think this would work by having a Asterisk system take the incoming call, send the (nationwide) page, pager is wired to phone, phone displays page as if it's an incoming call (while caller hears ringing), if callee decides to answer the GSM circuits get power and the phone calls the Asterisk box which patches the two together. If someone beats me to it, I'll buy one. Putting a RTL-SDR into the phone would take care of the pager circuit and make other neat things possible.

That's the most innovative idea I've heard of for reducing the impact of cell phone tracking in a long time!

What advantage does this give you?

Presumably by using a one-way pager network it gives you the opportunity to be completely passive (thereby undetectable) until you decide to initiate an actual call.

Also turning off your phone might not actually work:

http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/06/technology/security/nsa-turn...

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