A few years ago I was a titled member of a local activist group that was considered “militant” by local police. It was a Black-lead group (I’m white myself) that spoke out and fought against police corruption, had a low-frequency radio station, and some other cool socialist shit. Anyway, I learned in a roundabout way that the local police would come by my house weekly to keep tabs on when I was home and when I wasn’t. I’m pretty sure they did this with every member. I’ll admit it was kind of flattering, seeing as I don’t consider myself even remotely important, but also fun because it wasted some cops’ time.

I don’t think people fully realize that the tons of funding these pig farms get is enough to allow them to arbitrarily put surveillance on everyday folks without even breaking a sweat. Some of the FOIA requests I’ve heard about from people in my local activist circles are wild. FBI vans, country-wide surveillance tracking using ATM cameras, wild shit!

The tl;dr - yes, even you can be under some sort of surveillance. Even if it’s just that the cops have seen your face more than once at various marches.

TLDR: Detecting Stingrays is pretty trivial, they are active in a lot of places.

I use a software defined radio, mostly to have a cool map using ADS-B… but it also can receive in the ghz frequency bands and capture the unencrypted header information for cellular data.

That information is largely useless because modern cellular communications don’t expose anything private. However, most cellphones will automatically attempt to use a downgraded connection (5G -> 4G) if they lose connection with the tower.

Stingay/IMSI catcher/Cell Site Simulator take advantage of this by forcing phones in an area to downgrade their connections to older and less secure frequencies and then exploiting that downgrade to get information about the phones in the area.

You can detect these downgrade attacks by listening to the traffic and analyzing the packet captures.

I noticed that my cellphone was losing connection to the tower and I was trying to see if maybe the tower was rebooting or something odd.

I tuned into the frequency bands and saw that it was still transmitting a strong signal while my phone showed no connection. If I restarted the connection it would connect to the tower, but if not it would lose the connection for 15-20mins. It always happened towards midnight but, oddly, not always at the same time.

That made me curious so I found the software to packet capture the cellular data and detect downgrade attacks. Sure enough, I’d get a downgrade attack detection and my phone would drop connection.

After a bit more research I discovered that the connection dropping was a feature, not a bug. GrapheneOS can prevent your cellular modem from downgrading in order to mitigate these kinds of attacks.

And, also, that you don’t have to buy expensive software defined radios and do all of the annoying packet capture and analysis to detect these things. You can do it with cheap ($20) hardware and free software from the EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying

Too bad the site monitors only American cities.

probably not at the moment, but just after 9/11 I think I got on the UK's watch list for flights. Pre 9/11 I never had an issue at airports.

After 9/11 I was part of a usnet group that chatted about how easy it would be to do the bring a plane down with what could be legally be taken on a plane. Then every time I flew I was pulled out at the baggage scan / fully patted down / a couple of time it was to a booth and take off your jacket, belt, shoes, socks etc / always had to empty my carry-on bag / turn on ly laptop / etc.

This lasted until about 2005 - then just stopped and have never been patted down since

they should post this on c/schizophrenia

To dive deeper in the subject check this:

https://www.stopspying.org/peoples-handbook

I was. Drove in unregistered vehicle for a year so I guess i deserved it but still

i'm not incredibly diligent with privacy so the mass surveillance machine probably knows a thing or two about me. i haven't been doing anything to warrant the resources for personalized stalking though.

i also live in less of a police state, i think that helps too.