Oliver’s ‘Stealth Cell Tower’
Julian Oliver’s ‘Stealth Cell Tower’ is a base station that can hack phones that connect to it.
Gizmodo Australia reported on Oliver’s creation, which he called a “cool art project” that is an “artistic commentary on the nature of surveillance and privacy”. The ‘Stealth Cell Tower’ is an HP Inc LaserJet 1320 printer that has been altered “so that it would become a GSM 900 Base Station”, or mobile phone tower.
The site notes that this “gets even cooler/creepier”, as when phones connect to the tower, which “acts like it’s a regular mobile phone provider”, it sends them text messages “written in such a way that they appear to be from someone the recipient knows”, and “doesn’t even need to know the phone numbers”. The code used to run the tower has also been made available on Oliver’s website for “anyone who wants to build their own”.
Oliver explained: “With each response to these messages, a transcript is printed revealing the captured message sent, alongside the victim’s unique IMSI number and other identifying information. Every now and again the printer also randomly calls phones in the environment and on answering, Stevie Wonder’s 1984 classic hit I Just Called To Say I Love You is heard.”
The tower is a “continuation of work Oliver started in 2014”, after he “noticed how mobile phone towers are often hidden (poorly) in everyday objects”, with the website noting that the tower “is arguably even more clever than trying to hide a tower in trees or as lampposts, because it really does fit into the everyday object (the printer), perfectly”.
That year he also worked alongside another artist and engineer to create the ‘PRISM: Tower’, as “a way to emulate spying techniques used by the NSA”, or National Security Agency. That project saw him and his co-worker “successfully connect to 740 mobile phones and send out SMS messages (again, without needing to know their phone number) of a ‘paranoid and sardonic nature’”.