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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

Pretty cool!

I'm wondering if using an imsi catcher is still effective? Most of the time I'm using calling over wifi (VoLTE) or I'm in a car (where an imsi catcher isn't really practical).

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The purpose is to track the location of a specific phone using triangulation based on the closes cell towers which receive the phone’s signals. The phone maintains a connection to the nearest cell tower(s) to be on the network in case a call is initiated.

It’s not necessarily intended to intercept, although I believe there were some that downgraded G3 to G2 to be able to potentially do that.

I don’t know whether downgrade attacks are still viable (or needed).

Note that if you are being specifically targeted then a warrant to the provider would presumably net the equivalent of real time 911 location data.

As far as I understand, outside of active interception the only use for these things is warrantless dragnet surveillance of location. (And active interception is increasingly not possible due to better security practices.)

From what Ive read about stingrays here on HN, the device is fooling your cell phone to make a tower connection using the movile network. This does not depend on you making a call, the cell phone is normally doing background activity to connect to cell towers all the time.

IIRC even with airplane mode the stingray can capture phone info, IMEI, GPS location, etc.

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