We've (probably) arrived at one of those "hidden" dominant operating systems out there in the world: JavaCard OS. It's not just (probably) in your cell phone SIM, it's also (probably) in your credit cards. Add all of those devices up, and you realize that, in a weird way, if aliens were to inspect the activity of humans, they'd say, "the humans seem to be using some sort of weird thing they call 'JavaCard OS' to run their society."
If anyone is a JavaCard OS master, shoot me an email - numair@numair.com. I'm having some IC card issues that could use some external input...
In terms of the linked article, I think this part makes it clear what's going on, if we are to take an innocent view on things:
> After the lab work, deposition of an AT&T employee revealed that the only other trigger is a firmware update of the baseband processor. That is also consistent with the SIM requesting the IMEISV, since the “SV” part means “software version”, and it is updated every time the baseband processor loads new firmware. In this particular case, the phone had recently downloaded an update that included new baseband firmware. That was almost certainly the trigger for this message.
If I was a network engineer, I'd probably want a way to figure out whenever someone's putting new equipment on my network. This is a brilliantly sneaky way to do it. There's probably other uses for this, though, and you can imagine that your favorite intelligence agencies have thought about it long before it showed up in a Hacker News article...