Fire this under unnerving: a security firm found 17 "interceptor" cell phone towers around the country. These look like regular towers, but actually allow for eavesdropping and other hacking of cell phones in the area.
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"Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated," Les Goldsmith, CEO of ESD America, which markets a highly-encrypted smartphone, said to Popular Science. "One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found 8 different interceptors on that trip. We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas."
While ESD America's security team was able to find the ghost towers, they had no clue who they belonged to.
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"What we find suspicious is that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases. So we begin to wonder--are some of them U.S. government interceptors? Or are some of them Chinese interceptors?" Goldsmith asked Popular Science. "Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that's listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don't really know whose they are."
With the National Security Agency in court for the agency's massive cell phone metadata surveillance program of millions of unwitting Americans, these mysterious towers are highly suspicious. And if the government is not in charge of them, it could get even creepier.
