The stories about fake cell towers around the United States have been going on since early August. Popular Science had written the first article I saw concerning the discovery of these towers showing up. As a recap, these towers push you off of your network provider’s network and pull you down to their own radio towers.
By doing this your phone is lowered from a 4g/3g network to a 2g/extended network. While on these networks you can still take calls, make calls and send and receive text messages. The danger is that encryption of your call data is much easier to break. In other words your texts and your phone calls can be observed by a third party.
The original series of stories is reporting that the bulk of these towers were identified near military bases. Today, local Fox News in DC reported an story on an additional 15 identified fake towers within our nation’s capital. http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/26610194/tech-company-finds-mysterious-fake-cell-towers-in-dc-area
The original stories I have read all speculated on our own government agencies (NSA/Police/FBI/CIA…) being the culprit behind the scenes. Of course as I pointed out in a previous post, these towers only cost $1500 to build.
This is low tech espionage. With the bulk showing up around our military and now also in our capital, it seems ever more likely our enemies are trying to gauge our resources and professional military resolve as well as our plans.
Let us not forget, Washington D.C. is home to the Pentagon, as well as the central hub of all of our branches of government. Congressional staffers, NSA, White House and Presidential staff all operate within D.C. These people are all on the phone regularly, if they are being forced off their networks even with just their personal phones there is plenty of risk of spillage and important information being picked up by our enemies.
