Comment by torginus

9 hours ago

It's incredible how far back the surveillance state goes - GSM mobile phones have an IMEI number that's tied to the handset - and the SIM is tied to the subscriber, and your phone broadcasts imei to neighboring towers constantly.

I haven't really gotten really into this, but from what I can tell, anything that has to do with mobile phones is strictly worse in terms of anonimity than Wifi.

At least anything that ties a Wifi connection to you you can change in an OS setting, but if you get into faking IMEI/SIM stuff, that can very quickly get you charged with an actual crime.

8 comments

torginus

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rkozik1989  9 hours ago

One of the things about mobile phone is that there's 2 OSes on the phone: one that handles the phone stuff and the other that you as a user actually interact with. What's really scary about it is that the OS we do not think about is often licensed to the manufacturer (Apple, Samsung, etc.), closed-source, and dated. There's a lot of security firms that sell fake cell towers to law enforcement and governments and that gives them access to all of the data you send over the network. In older formats like 2G there was no encryption on anything sent over the wire.

If you dig into the fake cell tower rabbit hole you'll find what you're talking about to be an even worse problem.

numpad0  6 hours ago

Doesn't the whole SIM architecture exist so that phones don't have to be trusted? I believe IMEI can be anything in practice, so long that there isn't a blatant duplicate nearby, a bit like Ethernet MAC address. I don't know if it's legal but phone nerds seem to be editing IMEI all the time for non-Apple phones as well, using those leaked vendor tools.

pudgywalsh  7 hours ago

> surveillance state

How do you suppose mobile phones are meant to work without subscriber info?

> I haven't really gotten really into this

Clearly.

  • kodoman  7 hours ago

    I think the argument is more the IMEI side of things, one might naively expect that they could could simply change SIM and that would change ones identity and that anything like an IMEI could be easily configurable like how a MAC is on a NIC is.