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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

> And I guarantee there are devices listening into, characterising and locating radio emitters in major cities at the very least.

Not convinced there is that level of sophistication at play

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I don't know if it was involved here, but "spectrum monitoring" (that's the keyword for more information about equipment you can get and who the expected customers are) is definitely a thing that is done in many places, and not only by the military, but also by police and regulators. It's not clear where the mast was installed (the CoL police aren't specifically limited to that very small area and one arrest was South London and one was Manchester) but if it was in central London, as a glaring terrorist target with an airport (London City) and heliport, I'd be very, very surprised if there's nothing watching the spectrum. Whether the operators of the spendy gear would share the information up for such "petty" crime, I don't know.

And there's always the Ham community who really, really hate spectrum abusers.

> spectrum monitoring".... is definitely a thing that is done in many places

Not by Ofcom it isn't!

(At least, certainly not on any scale as far as RF interference/spoofing is concerned).

Ringway Manchester (YT radio enthusiast) has a good video about OFCOM DF monitoring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMUwIpWvnbE - may have been scaled back now, though.

Come to think of it, the mobile operators themselves have a large national network of radio receivers with lots of fancy time-of-flight, phased array multi-path, multi-band capabilities.

Maybe these days Ofcom can just ask them if they are interested in something specific.

They also rent space on the towers for other people's equiptment.

And if there is, they’re probably not going to be burning those resources on little people problems like phishing.

Burning resources? By turning on their spectrum analyzer and letting it log what it hears?

"Burning" in the opsec sense. Disclosing the existence and extent of their data collection by letting too many non-cleared peeps in on the secret.

Oh thanks for the clarification.

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.

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