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Comment by comrade1234 | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how this would work without being traced. Someone is paying rent on the apartments. For the simcards, I think they are all able to call 911 even if they don't have credit/dataplan. They're also able to connect to a tower and take up slots. So probably the only way to financially trace the simcards is the initial purchase.

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SIM cards don't 'call 911', you can call 911 even if there is no SIM card at all, all you need is a working radio.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if the hardware vendors had the bare minimum of ethics to prevent that.

But that would mean someone who needed to call 911 couldn't - maybe their prepaid service ran out yesterday? It would be entirely ethical to allow anyone with working hardware who needed to call during an emergency to do so, and unethical to prevent people from calling because they didn't have a working SIM.

I think the intention is that any gray-market VoIP termination running over one of these is already blocking such calls. People usually don’t need to call 9-1-1 internationally, and there is some auto-enabled tracking in some countries for 911 calls that could leak the sim farm’s location.

TFA suggests they were used for swatting which I think would require 911 access to work.

I thought PSAP access numbers were the method of choice. They’re public.

I wonder if all the cards in the photo are active at once, or only activated on some rotation. The latter would certainly make them a lot harder to detect

Probably depends how hard the phone companies are looking at the data. If the cards are mostly idle then they probably don't impact the service at the tower and if there is no service impact then the operators probably don't care.

When you think about the sheer scale of monitoring every cell phone in the country it probably doesn't stand out nearly as much as you would expect.

I'm just salivating at the thought of being on the telco side with access to all the base stations and writing various visualizations/analysis to find hotspots like these, bet it's a lot of fun. :-)

Can also text 911 now which would overburden the texting protocol network so no one else’s texts will go through.

It’s a cell tower jammer and terrorism multiplier. Can’t call or text. It will probably disturb internet service as well. Include a few radio jammers for local police and a few satellite antennas you could create an opportunity then a panic to cover your tracks getting out.

Its relatively hard to jam modern BTS with LTE and 5G. It's part of the design. PTP with fancy modulation helps :p

I would wager a huge majority of text messages in NYC will go through either RCS or iMessages which skips the SMS layer and instead goes direct to data.

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