FC: Fellowships; More on cell phone snooping and GSM crack

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[This year I was visiting faculty at George Mason University's IHS and have
been asked to recommend full time undergraduate or graduate students for
fellowships up to $18K/year. If politech list members who are seriously
interested in Internet liberty and individual rights want more info, let me
know. --DBM]

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Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 09:57:05 -0500
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
From: David Banisar <banisar () 2rad net>
Subject: cell phone intereception

Declan,

http://wired.lycos.com/news/politics/0,1283,32900,00.html

Moran from the GSM association claims that there is no hardware 
available to intercept GSM calls. I just wanted to point out that 
there are many commercial devices sold that are designed to intercept 
cell phone communications, and i belive that many of them have been 
redesigned to intercept digital communications (remember 
Triggerfish?). These are typically only supposed to be sold to law 
enforcement (at least under US law) but I imagine that any mega corp 
or rich individual with enough $$ can get one also.

Dave

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Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 20:45:31 +0100 (CET)
From: Lucky Green <shamrock () cypherpunks to>
To: declan () well com

-----
James Moran, the fraud and security director of the GSM Association in
Dublin, says that "nowhere in the world has it been demonstrated --an
ability to intercept a call on the GSM network. That's a fact.... To our
knowledge there's no hardware capable of intercepting." 
-----

At home, I have a screen shot of a commercial GSM interception station
operating in Moscow. I even have the manual. Unfortunately, it is in
Russian. These devices are sold for around USD 30k. I know I could build
one for well under USD 10k.

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