England's Metropolitan Police have a cell phone evesdropper

[thewayne]

This equipment can be used to "...shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area." It also covers an area "...up to an estimated 10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person's movements in real time."

Wow. I'm not really surprised, something like this is kind of inevitable. One of the purposes of this is to prevent a bomb from detonating that's rigged to a cell phone, which is kind of stupid, because any bomber worth their salt would have fallback detonators which this would not be able to counter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/30/metropolitan-police-mobile-phone-surveillance

Comments

[silveradept]

I would like to say "Wow, the American model is so popular we're exporting it elsewhere", but the UK probably taught us a thing or two about warrantless wiretapping.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

England has a much longer history of surveillance and domestic terrorism with the "Irish Problem". But at least they're taking some hints on American capitalism and exporting spy tech.

[silveradept]

Hooray for that...? Because we really want other countries to repeat our screw-ups because they were following us too closely.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I think England is about as doomed as the U.S. is in that they're too tightly linking their government into the War on Terror. Now, they have more significant terrorist problems than we do, and we both have occasional domestic terrorist problems. And I had another point, but it's late and my brain is fried from doing two hours of algebra homework, so I'm going to bed.

[silveradept]

Well, once we decided that normal police work and personnel weren't enough, and that the only way to go was by running roughshod over any other rules we might have used to govern the engagement, yeah, we're pretty well screwed.