I enjoyed that. I was in a free ranging discussion back around the time Snowden made his move and we talked about constructing a laptop with a cellphone embedded inside of it such that it would record things that went on around it. We figured we could remove the hard drive and replace it with the guts of a cell phone and an SSD equivalent storage. Then use the existing laptop's Wifi antenna as a (likely not great) cell phone antenna. The idea being that you could download analytics from it if it was seized at border crossings or searched.

No, I never had the courage to actually try something like that. This phone hack seems like a modest equivalent with the exception that the phone could be unhacked by a forced OS wipe.

That said, the effectiveness of this as a surveillance tool was pretty eye opening. It seems possible that the criminal in this story steals phones every couple of weeks and puts their sim card into it, use it for a while, and then resell it. Which is pretty good operational security when you think about it (caveat keeping the same sim card) Mapping the meta data and contacts for this person then lets you know who else is in their community.

So with law enforcement powers you could presumably "seed" the stolen phone market with pre-compromised phones and develop a pretty quick understanding of who the criminals were, their infrastructure for moving phones around, etc. Which would make it pretty straight forward to roll up these criminal networks. Of course when it became known that the police were seeding the stolen phone market with 'mark' phones it would probably cut down on the number of phones stolen. But if you have prepared for that and are now supplying a line of cheap "new" burner phones in the shops that you have compromised. Well it is scary how effective that might be.

Now you tie that analysis with the fact that the Paris attackers all had burner phones and you start to see how such actions by the authorities would be justified to law makers.