Detect Suspicious Cell Activity with RayHunter #shorts

Our Take

Cell-site simulators — Stingrays, dirtboxes, IMSI catchers, whatever you want to call them — are the quiet cousins of license plate readers. Both are dragnet tools: one slurps up your location by tricking your phone into connecting to a fake tower, the other photographs your plate every time you drive past a pole. RayHunter, the open-source project out of EFF, is one of the few consumer-accessible ways to actually detect when a fake tower is messing with your phone's connection, instead of just hoping your carrier or local PD aren't running one.

Credit to STS Technologies LLC for putting this in front of more people in under a minute, though it's worth noting the video doubles as an ad for their pre-flashed Orbic hotspot running the software — a shortcut for people who don't want to build their own from EFF's free instructions. That's fine, but the real story here isn't the hardware, it's that a nonprofit civil liberties org had to build a detector because neither cops nor carriers will tell you when they're spoofing a tower near your house.

This is the same pattern we track with ALPR networks like Flock: surveillance infrastructure gets deployed quietly, with no public notice and often no warrant, and private citizens end up building their own tools just to know it's there. If you want to see what's already watching your streets, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on secret surveillance deployments in your town, start with our take-action guide.