"Crypto" is just a buzzword that people who don't understand tech jump to as a kneejerk reaction.
On the other hand, solar powered mining with just good enough radios to do C2 and send back any hashes found would be an exact match to this scale of equipment.
To me, top 25 seems major, but to someone else top 20 would be major. I don't think "major" in the context of metro areas is an official term.
If anything Salt Lake seems about average size for a city, it’s just located in the middle of nowhere which makes it seem more important. This is also why they need this kind of backup communication system so close to the city.
This place is cursed with the worst pointless nerd sniping behavior.
Talking about metro size is actually relevant because if it was a major metro area like say LA they could actually use the cellphone network that would blanket the area. Instead it’s a modest city in basically the middle of nowhere thus the problem.
The numbers are more like: 1) Salt Lake City: 200K people 2) Salt Lake City Metro Area (MSA): 1.25-1.3 million 3) Salt Lake-Ogden-Provo Combined Statistical Area (CSA): ~2.7 Million. FYI this region is also called the "Wasatch Front"
To understand these levels of breakdown the equivalent for Bay Area naming would be: 1) San Francisco itself (the 49 square miles): ~800K people 2) San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley MSA: ~4.6 million 3) San Jose-SF-Oakland CSA (think the whole "Bay Area"): ~9.5 Million
It's the Combined Statistical Area of SLC (the "Wasatch Front") which is now ~22nd-24th in the nation, not the MSA itself.
It's similar in size to Charlotte or Sacramento, and larger than the respective CSAs of eg Pittsburgh, San Antonio, Kansas City, Nashville, or Las Vegas
Which is why it isn’t surrounded by a great cellphone network, and thus why they are setting up a independent radio network.
Good enough where you wouldn’t need to set up your own system. Or be stupid enough to make them noticeable and have the Forest Service confiscate them. I mean, come on, a little black paint and a cryptic “Property of US Government” sticker would go a long way.
Or, if you want to be super sneaky just throw them up on a telephone pole because it’s well known that the companies only mess with their own equipment so you can hide stuff in plain sight.
And these seem to be right outside SLC proper.
Suggesting it’s useful in places that overlapped ignores the utility in areas where it would be the only option. I doubt drug dealers are meeting up in the desert outside of cellphone range with their suppliers, but it isn’t a crazy idea.
They want total control, not bribes.
One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions.
I don't want to go into the details of the torture because its bad stuff, involving cannibalism even. If you are morbidly curious there's a couple interviews with survivors you can find somewhere on youtube.
And this is far from the only instance of this sort of thing. Sinaloa has been known to kidnap entire buses and make folks fight to the death, winner gets the dubious honor of becoming a member.
These are people who assume every single person in their world is plotting to overthrow them in an instant, and leave nothing to chance vs that. They don't want to hope their bribe is enough to keep you loyal, they want to know you're loyal because you've seen them torture to death countless people. You don't get any agency in the matter.
I have friends that live in Mexico so we talk about it fairly often as well. One of my friends in particular is a wireless business owner with customers near Brownsville/Matamoros, where those telcom engineer kidnappings happened, so he's acutely aware of things.
[1] - https://es.insightcrime.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mexic...
This sounds like:
1. Just a rehash of the original Hashashin tale.
2. A spooky story cartel members might tell.
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxP-TMArlV0
This is far from the only source you can find that supports what I'm saying. Search for CJNG to find more about them. They're sort of the Phoenix that rose from the infamous Los Zetas.
Why would an engineer willfully take a cartel job, when there is a high risk of them killing you instead of paying you, and killing you by cutting off your face just because they were bored and disturbed? If a cartel even offered me a job, I'd fear for my life.
These people really are as bad as it gets. You don't want to be anywhere close to involved with them.
Cartels in CONUS are typically using regular cell and satellite phones. Ostensibly, the NSA and the various military "Activities" aren't paying attention to CONUS communications, unless it's near the border.
There isn't enough information in the article to reasonably tell what they're designed for. If someone wants to post actual photos of the hardware, that would be swell.
Presumably self-operated infrastructure could expand comms to remote areas that don't normally have cell service. They makes sense in stretches of the southern border. But right outside salt lake city is covered by cell access.
It's not worth discussing the specifics in the open, but the investigative techniques have gotten good enough that even "anonymous" SIM cards don't buy you anything.
What I was alluding to is when you have full access to the cellular network, there are other indicators that can be used to task tracking other than just the SIM card. You don't need to know that phone X is person Y, you just need to know that phone X fits the criteria of how a drug mule operates.
And my point is that this is way, way harder than looking out the window and noticing a radio tower perched on a hilltop that wasn't there before. It's far more clandestine to obtain security through obscurity even if it means operating in a network controlled by the authorities. Encrypted traffic looks like any other encrypted traffic. There's little to make a drug dealer stand out from other cell phone traffic, unless they're communicating over cleartext.
That is the point I am trying to get to without giving away specifics. The reason you see homegrown communications networks in Mexico is because it is trivial for the DEA to identify members of smuggling operations by way of cell phone TTPs. DEA obtains both explicit and unauthorized access to cellular networks in foreign countries. At that point it is a pretty trivial pattern matching problem which allows you to identify persons of interest and track them going forward.
They do use large scale "direction finding" to identify radios used by smuggling operations, but that is primarily targeted at boats with higher power transmitters.
What doesn't make sense is deploying infra in the vicinity of major cities. There's plenty of benign cell phone traffic there, and this kind of pattern matching is not viable.
They should be able to eliminate Helium as the culprit if they're able to inspect what's in the box, as Helium needs a Helium-sanctioned box, from my understanding.
Very strange thing to say when the parent explained exactly why this could be crypto and why it's plausible. Do you know how Helium works?
Do a Google Image Search on "helium crypto solar power" and you will see many devices that look like that.
Would think that crypto would have too long a payback esp if the equipment keeps disappearing.
Some ham radio repeaters atop high-rise buildings I know of are kind of sketchy (such as when someone in the local radio club makes friendly with building engineers/management so they don't have to pay commercial leasing fees or go through HOA baloney, and will sometimes keep the location a secret to avoid attention), but the vast majority are listed on publicly available databases like RepeaterBook, ARTSCIPUB, RFinder, ARRL Repeater Directory, and/or each state's repeater coordination directory, or the AREDN mesh directory, or other ham radio WAN sites.
Since SLC is still totally clueless as to who put these up, it rules out LDS Hams for me.
They seem to be in obvious, high traffic areas. The one mentioned in the video is a short hike from the Utah capitol building. If you hike at all and live in salt lake, this is where you go. Especially in the winter. It seems like they were asking to be found.
It’s certainly less in the winter, but in the summer hundreds of people would hike or bike past this everyday.
if you still have money tied up in crypto you can still try and sell it
[0] https://www.deseret.com/2008/1/31/20067144/happy-valley-delv...