"An International Mobile Subscriber Identity-catcher, or IMSI-catcher, is a telephone eavesdropping device used for intercepting mobile phone traffic and tracking location data of mobile phone users. Essentially a "fake" mobile tower acting between the target mobile phone and the service provider's real towers, it is considered a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. The 3G wireless standard has some risk due to mutual authentication required from both the handset and the network. However, sophisticated attacks may be able to downgrade 3G and LTE to non-LTE network services which do not require mutual authentication"
Of course foreign governments and businesses have IMSI catchers to snoop on the politicians. Probably in Albany too. They don't seem like rocket science to build, as all they really are just fake cellphone towers that mimic real towers -- all well established science. The components are most likely just off-the shelf components, and nothing that exotic. IF the government can do it, then certainly the private sector can figure it out.
A lot of projects uses 555 Timer Chips. I saw you can get 20 of them for 71 cents including shipping direct from China on AliExpress. Or 51 cents once the sale starts in two days. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Original-Texas-Instruments-TI-NE555P-programmable-timer-integrated-circuit-and-oscillator-HYC-3253-h-DIP-8/32308116026.html
"The 555 timer IC is an integrated circuit (chip) used in a variety of timer, pulse generation, and oscillator applications. The 555 can be used to provide time delays, as an oscillator, and as a flip-flop element. Derivatives provide two (556) or four (558) timing circuits in one package. Introduced in 1972 by Signetics, the 555 is still in widespread use due to its low price, ease of use, and stability. It is now made by many companies in the original bipolar and in low-power CMOS technologies. As of 2003, it was estimated that 1 billion units were manufactured every year.[5] The 555 is the most popular integrated circuit ever manufactured."
I wanted to upgrade to QGIS 3.0 but I am going to hold off as I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and they are not going to backport libraries to this soon to be obsolete version of software. Eventually I'll upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS when that comes out and also install QGIS 3.01 or whatever the bug fix version is at that point. I'm going to have to port over my pyqgis scripts that I use to make maps which is another consideration before I can get up and going with this next version of the software but I'm excited about some of the new features like easy label adjustments and more coloring options. QGIS is rapidly becoming a very professional grade of software. I should think seriously about donating to their cause.
I've been using Linux for two decades now. It works great, and one thing I like about it is modular nature and backwards compatibility which means you can run things like the XCFE desktop manager that never changes. I think over the past decade XCFE has only seen a handful of updates and it's very fast on modern computers and uses very little memory.