Skip to content

Comment on SeaGlass: City-Wide IMSI-Catcher Detection (2017)parent

Comments

There was another one in f-droid (or at least it was named differently at the time) that I had installed and running by curiosity a few years ago. I more or less forgot it until one day while I was driving on the highway and got forcibly directed out because of a blockade set by protesters (nation-wide protests by farmers occurring at that time). Once in the vicinity of said blockade I got notified unequivocally that something weird was happening to the cellular network. I guess law enforcement people were using IMSI catchers to monitor protesters.

Just anecdotal evidence, however, while I almost never got false positive alerts from this app (once at the arrival of an international flight), the one time it triggered a notification, it was in a highly probable situation.

Communication between our devices and these base stations being so opaque (closed-source baseband processors/OS not helping there) and sensible, I'm glad these projects exist and I just installed this one, blaming myself for not doing so earlier.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.