Hi
I just remembered a strange behavior I had with my Fairphoen 3 with LineageOS and I wanted to share it and maybe find an explanation.
A while back I was in France for holidays and my phone started to act wired. At first nothing was out of the ordinary, but when I arrived at my destination my phone started to turn off or rebooted in random intervals. It seemed to have no pattern, sometimes I could use my phone normally for a few hours before it shut down or rebooted. Other times I had it shut down almost all 30 minutes or so. The moment I was back in the middle of France everything was back to normal, no shutdowns or reboots.
My friends with normal phones (IPhone or Google-Andorid) had no problems.
Sadly I had the logs not turned on back then, so I can not see what the system did… I thought of a few possible reasons for such an behavior:
- Phone and/or Lineage was not compatible with the local telecom infrastructure
- Some App made system errors
- Other OS errors
- Jamming/Government action
Even though I assume something trivial, like compatibility or software related, I find it worth mentioning that I was near Brest. Brest is a french navy port for destroyers and nuclear submarines. I also saw some heavy guarded bases and bunkers where I assume nuclear bombs are stored, to load them onto the submarines. The military presence in and around Brest was quite high. This brought the question to my mind, could it be that out of caution, the military jams or attacks non-Gogole phones that are not easy to track or just fall out of the ordinary? It is a far stretch I know, but it was just strange to have those problems starting the moment I traversed into a high military presence area and resolve themselves when I was out of that area.
What are your thoughts?
It’s not like they can track what phone model and operating system you have just by you being in the area. I think it could still have to do with the military base though. The phone could have picked up some sort of military frequencies which it couldn’t process and so it crashed.
If you connect to the wrong tower, can’t they get IMEI info? That won’t include OS, but it will give phone model/mfr and other details. I remember reading about regional police forces or intelligence agencies gathering data in North America at least (and they were explicitly gathering personal & usage data too, to see if they could find criminals supposedly).
I think also in the UK where The Guardian (or was it some other paper), found and published the use if IMSI-Catchers on protests?
Could be, maybe some frequency band is still not handled well by LineageOS but other phone OSs do, and the military uses those.
I want to go back, this time with my radio analyzing tools just to find out more, but would not be a wise move with today’s tensions in Europe… (or in general near military bases)