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A comment on Cops hid use of phone tracking tech in court documents at feds’ request.

Re:Cops hid use of phone tracking tech in court documents at... by CWuestefeld on Friday June 20, 2014 @11:51AM (#7921215)
The way stingray works is reportedly by pretending to be a cell phone tower. It seems to me this can be used by a smartphone app to monitor for stingray usage.

If the phone knows that it's not moving very fast (Androids certainly know this, I'm sure iPhones can as well), and a new cell phone tower appears suddenly, it seems to me that would be a good indicator somebody is stingraying nearby. (this isn't bulletproof, but would be a good starting point for further data analysis)

An app like this could record and report such incidents, so that we could form a larger picture of how often and how widely it's used.

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Re:Cops hid use of phone tracking tech in court documents at... by ihsw on Friday June 20, 2014 @01:40PM (#7921792)
There are already mobile cell towers in use by AT&T et al, they're used for large events (eg: sporting events).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_on_wheels

Differentiating between them and stingrays would be difficult, especially since the baseband chips in your phone are proprietary technology that can lie to the host OS (iOS, Android, etc).

However there are already projects for real-time mapping of cell towers on a national basis, which is a good start, but they will always be a step behind the US Government (for example).

Additional reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_cell_sites

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Re:Cops hid use of phone tracking tech in court documents at... by mentat on Friday June 20, 2014 @02:27PM (#7922029)
WiGLE.net has been collecting cell phone tower location data for a while. I wonder (a) if there are any Stingrays captured there and (b) if this with more data would be capable of building immediate alerting to Stringray use. I tend to think it could.
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