And I guarantee there are devices listening into, characterising and locating radio emitters in major cities at the very least.
https://www.33700.fr/informations-pratiques/signaler-un-mess...
I like the fact that some of the earliest mappings had 0 mapped to "OPER" ("Operator"), because it makes me imagine that this number 33700 is like some interpretation of 337 and then shouting twice for the "operator" (as in, the literal physical person that used to sit and connect calls using wires and a patch board).
Taking this further then, and given that:
- 3 is assigned to any of the three letters DEF, and
- 7 is assigned to any of the three letters PRS,
we could invent the following meaning:
DES = "Déclaration d'Envoi de Spam". (Lit. "Declaration of sending of spam", as in a report about spam sending).
The double 0 is, as mentioned, in our invented meaning like shouting "Operator! Operator!"
And with this invented meaning it's like we are shouting for help from the operator to deal with this spam :D
Of course here I'm starting with 337 and backronyming "DES" to a plausible but probably weird sentence. If it was a real, the French would probably have worded the original sentence quite differently and the resulting number would be different as well.
(Also, looking at the article I'm not sure if any European countries also had 0 used for "OPER" or not. Guess I'll have to travel to some museums in France and have a look at some old phones with my own eyes at some point.)
Not convinced there is that level of sophistication at play
I don’t think spectrum monitoring capability is all that secret. Certainly anyone with the knowledge to set up their own BTS should recognize the possibility they could be triangulated.
And there's always the Ham community who really, really hate spectrum abusers.
Not by Ofcom it isn't!
(At least, certainly not on any scale as far as RF interference/spoofing is concerned).
Maybe these days Ofcom can just ask them if they are interested in something specific.
Transmitting on a licensed mobile service band without the license is a very good way to earn a knock on your door.
Eavesdropping on tower-to-handset comms is illegal too (in the UK), but it's not very practical to find just a receiver, unless they already know almost exactly where it is and are able to do a TEMPEST-like attack on the local oscillator or something. So as long as you keep quiet and don't do anything to indicate you're listening, such as, posting on Twitter about it or you do crime based on it, you'll get away with it. However, a receiver can't bump a victim handset down to a primitive-enough protocol, so all you'll get is encrypted content and maybe a smidge of metadata (I'm not sure exactly what is and isn't encrypted for each "G").