If you are my age and grew up in Britain, then Stingray was one of the fore-runners of Thunderbirds (and Team America: World Police , in a rather different sense), made with marionettes rather than actors. This was in the days before CGI and so allowed special effects to be done at reasonable cost. Stingray was a submarine, part of the world aquanaut security patrol (WASP). If you want to know more, Wikipedia has more than you could ever want. Apparently, it was the first TV series to be made entirely in color, so I suppose it was a milestone in its own way. But that's not what I'm talking about. Stingray is a cell-phone technology of dubious legality. It is referenced at Mobile World Congress, but I doubt that I'll be seeing any of these there. They are something that the authorities like to pretend doesn't exist. A Stingray is basically a cell phone tower simulator. Nearby cell phones, which make the decision about which tower to connect with based on signal strength, connect to it in preference to the more distant genuine tower. The Stingray routes all the calls back into the network so that everything works correctly and you don't realize you've been intercepted. However, everything is recorded. The Stingray operator can tell which phones were in an area, who they called, who they texted, and so on. The latest versions can even decrypt the calls themselves. The original one was manufactured by Harris with the Stingray name. I think other manufacturers make them too now, but the Stingray name has become a generic name for this sort of device. The official term is an IMSI-catcher (for international mobile subscriber identity). The basis for the technology is a hole in the security of GSM and other mobile technologies. When the standard was developed, the assumption was that the base stations would be run by reputable operators, but the handsets were a wild jungle. Base stations were 50-foot tall towers costing millions of dollars, so the idea of someone building a fake one undetected was ridiculous. So handsets had to authenticate themselves to the network, but the network didn't have to authenticate itself to the handset. It is therefore relatively easy to simply hijack the connections because they are not authenticated. Stingray devices used to (and may still) require signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that insisted that it be kept confidential that a Stingray device had been used, or even that they existed. Prosecutors needed to find evidence through other means, and several prosecutions were dropped rather than reveal how frequently law enforcement was using such devices. Since they are typically used without a warrant and typically vacuum up all phone connections in an area, it seems pretty clear that they are not legal, which is one reason that law enforcement is so secretive and sensitive about its usage. However, information about Stingray usage has gradually crept out. At the very least, they are a major invasion of privacy for the innocent individuals who are not the criminals being sought. If you want to read more about these issues, the Cato Institute has a white paper . The thing that worries me about technologies like this isn't so much that law enforcement is using them (probably) illegally (although that is bad enough). It is that there is a sort of Moore's Law for almost any technology. Cell phone base stations used to be a $1M tower, then we have smaller base stations for infill in places like conference centers, then pico base stations for small areas with poor reception, or just to offload the heavyweight tower. Something like Stingray only became feasible when a base station got small enough that you could build a fake one that was portable. But they keep getting smaller. What happens when you can buy a Stingray type of capability for $1000, or even $100? Anyone can eavesdrop on anyone if they feel so inclined. Nuclear bombs seem like a technology that doesn't scale like this (for a start, the critical mass of material required isn't getting smaller, thank goodness). But biotechnology is changing, especially in the last couple of years with CRIPSR ( Wikipedia ) technology that allows very precise gene editing. At the beginning of this technology, you needed to be a nation state to consider building a custom virus; then a top-tier biology lab. Soon any competent biochemist will be able to make one in their garage. As we discovered with Dr. Khan in Pakistan, not all technical experts are the good guys. You might have heard of the Fermi paradox. Apparently, Fermi had been at lunch with some colleagues and they'd discussed the fact that there are so many galaxies and so many stars that life must exist in many places elsewhere in the universe. Enrico Fermi's comment was, "Where is everybody?". This is known as the Fermi Paradox. I read a book on this called If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens, Where Is Everybody? , which gives 75 possible solutions to the paradox. One is that all civilizations have to get past the stage when a single individual can destroy the entire civilization. We are not there yet, but we do seem to get closer all the time. Have a nice day!![]()
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