Wall Street Journal report at this link.
Fake cell towers on a plane is so very doable and actually a very efficient way of collecting a mass of data quickly. Stationary fake towers like Stingray or a mobile Stingray in a vehicle can catch IMSI's. Fly around in a helicopter, plane or even a drone with a fake cell tower and it is picking up IMSI and their location at the speed of the aircraft. The only thing to figure is optimum height for max area coverage. It is an airborne IMSI vacuum cleaner.
This type of collection is especially effective when large areas where driving an equipped vehicle around limits it to roads and a large area to cover only where detection range is limited to road location. Like vast generally uninhabited areas of interest like boarder areas.
The general idea of airborne wifi is one that came to me after 9/11 when I saw a map of all flights in the air at the time. An amazing graphic. The application that I saw at the time was for wifi signal receiving equipment to be installed on all aircraft to establish a mesh network in the event of a catastrophic nationwide communications failure. There would be distance gaps at some points at some times but in general the mesh nodes are up there flying commercial routes all the time.
A more limited application that I considered was cell phone 911 calls ground to passing overhead aircraft if the possible line of sight transmission distance was less than 50,000 feet. It would accept an emergency 911 call (it would have to be 911 plus a designator number for use in remote areas with no cell phone service in case of emergency. Generally more applicable to remote western US areas. The call would be recorded and downloaded when the flight arrived at the destination or forwarded by the aircraft communication system network. If such a system saved a given number of lives per year it would be worth it. More than that, it seemed to be simply doable.
I never considered the application to spying and looking the other way; from air to ground and picking up an IMSI transmitted from a cell phone and its location. That is equally possible but the reason to spy like that on citizens was not so well recognized 10 years or more ago.
Is that possible? Put a black box IMSI catcher on commercial airline flights and collect IMSI's all the way across country. Retransmit them in real time or download/offload the black box on arrival? I hope they put it in airplane mode for take off and landing otherwise it would be in violation of federal regulations!
A Justice Dept black box fake cell phone tower on commercial airlines flights. Is that why there are Federal Air Marshalls on the flights? What kind of baggage do they collect at the end of the flight. Does it get special handling? Wow, I just dreamed up a conspiracy theory. I doubt if I have to throw in a few more key words for this to get attention.
A year or two ago there was a report about major cell phone theft and funneling of stolen cell phones thru Florida to Central/South American countries. There was a mysterious character that would "unlock" them. The whole thing looked like a spy scheme to doctor used phones and get them into the hands of bad guys south of the border. The only thing left to do is find out where the phones and when. The job of an airborne IMSI catcher on a drug mission aircraft. More conspiracy theory here. Who would do that?
Aside from the Federal Agencies, Police Law Enforcement Agencies are in fact using Stingray devices to catch IMSI's. Is it at all believable that somebody did not think of putting an IMSI catcher on a police helicopter. It would work as well in a chopper as a car. I suppose it would take two flying in some kind of distance/height relationship to triangulate location. That is probably not necessary because all it takes is a reception of the same signal from a new location.
Dirt boxes for sale here but they can't really talk about their features.
A drone IMSI catcher here at this 2011 link.
Anybody with this equipment can fly over an area and collect IMSI numbers and their location or a single targeted number. Big data IMSI is associated to cell phone telephone numbers and held be the cell phone provider. If that big data was stolen it would be far more valuable to someone than credit card numbers. What cell phone numbers relate to what IMSI numbers is valuable big data to monetize especially when it is associated to customer identification. With this info all one has to do is fly around a target area to find the location of the cell phone and probably on the person of interest.
Move along, nothing new here: This isn't exactly new. Harris' Stingray price list has AIRBRN-KIT-CONUS for sale for $9,000, dating back to 2008:
https://info.publicintelligence.net/Harris-SurveillancePrice...
More detailed info on DRT at this link.
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