The world is astoundingly safe that these sorts of thing don't happen all the time. Anyone who could light a cigarette could start wildfires all over California and many other places during the summer. Anyone who can buy a GPS jammer could disrupt one of the busiest airports in the world. With all the misanthropes out there you'd think chaos would happen more often. Glad it doesn't.

There was a time you could just walk around with a radio receiver and spy on everyone's phonecalls (IMEI stingray). Iirc it's not possible/that easy anymore with LTE.

AFAIK you can still do passive IMSI sniffing, which isn't full content but is quite interesting metadata.

Yeah, I’m going to need a write up/video on this…

(Not saying you’re lying, I just want to learn more!)

For GSM, basic IMSI sniffing: https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher (usable with cheap SDRs)

For LTE, basic IMSI sniffing: https://github.com/JiaoXianjun/LTE-Cell-Scanner (usable with cheap SDRs)

For LTE, full-on sniffing of all unencrypted metadata: https://github.com/SysSec-KAIST/LTESniffer (generally requires fancy SDRs with GPSDO)

Can vouch that the first and second repos definitely worked as of about a year ago, but haven't personally tried since then. I don't have a USRP X310 (yet!) so can't personally speak to the fancy one.