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.