My guess would be that the situation isn't that they can't find the stringrays but that they can't distinguish between "hostile" and "friendly" stringrays. After all, each agency deploying such devices does so as secretly as possible, naturally not alerting other agencies, and so there's no list of friendly stingrays.

It's all very Kim Stanley Robinsonesque in his climate-change trilogy where there are so many US Shadow agencies that they are constantly getting in each other's way.

Or just your typical Russian, Chinese spy operations...

We'll pull ours back as soon as yours are gone from Moscow.

This response doesn't get enough appreciation.

Especially considering the POTUS uses a standard android phone.

I believe he switched to an iPhone. [1] I was at an analytics event this year where they were analyzing his tweets based on the originating platform. 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/donald-...

I'm more under the impression that there are several people who tweet using that account (you'll remember one of his lawyers claiming they did one time he really screwed up) using different platforms

I can't find the link on mobile right now, but there was an article I read a while back (on HN, actually, I think) where someone did statistical analysis on the speech patterns of Trumps tweets and correlated those with times he was known to have been using his phone (or something like that) and deduced that there were two primary parties responsible for his Twitter account: Trump himself and a PR person/team. Any politically-minded (in the classical sense) or campaign tweet was almost always by the PR team, and every inflammatory, grammatically incorrect, etc. tweet was by him (presumably).

I was thinking of the same article, and found it, I think [1]? There was a higher-rated link also posted around the same time with the same post content [2]. I also found a follow up post [3] while looking for [1].

[1] http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/

[2] https://www.r-bloggers.com/text-analysis-of-trumps-tweets-co...

[3] http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-followup/

lmao at the obvious security risk involved here, surely leaking the location of the President to an external service will not end poorly

Probably, they don't want to find them.

Not knowing how to find them, is a load of crap. You can certainly find them, it just takes expensive equipment and time.

If it were me, the antenna would be a few hundred feet away from the equipment.

And the antenna wouldn’t be anything like an antenna, just something that looks like a lawn-chair.

And I’d move it every day or two. And definitely not run it 24h!!!

Could still be found, but good luck.

Hmm, then you need a super-mega-amplifier tacked on to boost the signal over the cable (AFAIK, the frequencies used really like short antenna runs).

So that then means a super-thick faraday cage around the actual device, and probably somewhat noteworthy power consumption (a battery certainly wouldn't be enough).

Probably meant transmitter (antennae + encoder/decoder) separated from actual BTS hardware & operatives.

So after counter-side finds your camouflaged BTS, it is only disposable and relatively cheap part and doesn’t lead to whole operation uncover.

That probe part then would connect to starbucks wi-fi and interact with BTS software somewhere far from physical location, so you can’t quickly trace channel between probe and spy team.

Doh. I see, of course.

Yeah, I'd gotten it in my head the BTS (TXCO) and the probe equipment needed to be super close together...

or just asking the cell towers providers for list of genuine hardware, and then cross-checking that against triangulated antennas.