This is not a conspiracy theory—yet. It is a mystery and it is real. There has been a rise in high-level-encryption cell phones. Expensive phones with expensive services that claim to provide better security than most cell phones. One such company is
CryptoPhone. They are marketed in America by
ESD America. These are phones with many of the security flaws of your favorite Android phone sealed up. ESD America's
CEO Les Goldsmith:
To show what the CryptoPhone can do that less expensive competitors cannot, he points me to a map that he and his customers have created, indicating 17 different phony cell towers known as “interceptors,” detected by the CryptoPhone 500 around the United States during the month of July alone.
Disturbing? Yes. What's an
interceptor? Well, it's a known
technology. As
Rob Waugh points out:
[T]hey are mobile installations of the kind used not only by law enforcement and government agencies, but also by scammers and other criminals...
[T]he surprise is that they are in active use.
Mr. Goldsmith explains the mystery and also provides you with some good old-fashioned information
to get even more paranoid about:
Who is running these interceptors and what are they doing with the calls? Goldsmith says we can’t be sure, but he has his suspicions.
“What we find suspicious is that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases. So we begin to wonder – are some of them U.S. government interceptors? Or are some of them Chinese interceptors?” says Goldsmith. “Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that's listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don't really know whose they are.”
Would I know if I was being
intercepted?
"If you've been intercepted, in some cases it might show at the top that you've been forced from 4G down to 2G. But a decent interceptor won't show that,” says Goldsmith. “It'll be set up to show you [falsely] that you're still on 4G. You'll think that you're on 4G, but you're actually being forced back to 2G.”
Ugh. Never fear, the
FCC is here.
The Federal Communications Commission has established a task force to study reported misuse of surveillance technology that can intercept cellular signals to locate people, monitor their calls and send malicious software to their phones.
Do you want one of the more secure phones? They only cost around $3,500.00. For one. I'll have two!