@ackshewally There's also D4:2D:C5 for i-PRO & a bunch for Motorola Solutions Inc. (different child company from Motorola, seems to make police hardware). Does anyone know any more OUIs? There are a few other Bluetooth police hardware manufacturers I've found that don't seem to have OUIs.
Also, does using an asterisk like that work? I've been using a regex for it & I would like to turn it into that to make it more readable.
I wish there was something better than BLE Radar for this that could search for things other than just MAC addresses & preset manufacturers.
@the_third I couldn't find anything about Motorola Solutions specifically except that they make police equipment. This isn't the same as the other companies named Motorola, it's a different company.
Motorola Solutions is a dominant radio manufacturer in the government/first responder space, as well as major infrastructure providers. Yes, that means cops, but it also means firefighters, ambulances, trains, buses, airports, and any fleet of mobile service for mission critical stuff like electric utilities, telecom, and some aviation uses. Back in the day of trunk radio, it used to be common for taxis, too.
Motorola sold its consumer mobile businesses (cell phones) in 2011 in a spinoff as "Motorola Mobility," around the time it was shutting down and selling off pieces of its space/satellite businesses, but kept most of its other businesses. Today's Motorola Solutions is the legal successor to the Motorola that invented the cell phone.
I looked into maybe getting a flipper a while back and decided the hackRF would be the way to go. I never got either, but from what I was reading, hackRF let's you do all the things people who own flippers wish the flipper did.
MAC addresses are assigned to the hardware and do not change with each boot (first 3 pairs are company second 3 pairs are the device), unless you spoof the address then you can make it display any MAC address you wish but the MAC of the device never changes.
Advertised WiFi MAC is randomized per AP by most devices these days, and Bluetooth also have equivalent privacy protocols. So unless you can get the device to connect to you then you won't see a static identifier that can be followed
i wrote some scripts that runs airodump ng, then clean the csv, send all beacons with timestamp to a database.
this helped me to collect mac adresses for some time now and allows me to have alerts if neighbours are back from vacation (e.g. using home assistant i get notifications ob androidTV)
i did not go for bluetooth because espresence for homeassistant does that out of the box. https://espresense.com/
exactly that.
i am currently in the trouble of visualising the data (i use grafana) but still not happy.
what you might wanna do is just collect data and query it later to learn about the mac adresses you are looking for.
e.g. run airodump every 10 minutes, write mac and timestamp to mysql. then you only need to write down when your colleagues/neighbour arrived or left for like 2-3 days and then query like "which devices were present after time x on these days ..." and the larger your dataset the more accurate your results.
the guy in the peremeter detection has like 1 client a day ...so thats easy. but with more ppl around you, cars being APs etc. you need more data to be sure which mac is who.
maybe if you want to track cop cars use that and gpt4o to watch a cam feed of your street to match copcar & mac.
if you got a few solid hits you can use that to figure out patters...like you know cop1 is around everyX hours which tracked mac matches that.
i am sure mac is much more reliable than bluetooth due to range, consistency etc...
Unfortunately, this requires your local police department to have the latest axon gear… I’ve actively sat down and listened for signals near my local police and didn’t spot any advertising beacons
Is there anything iphones can do besides scroll social media? Every time I hear about some cool new capability of phones this caveat is always present.
Complain about how blurry their 60 second video came through and blame it on android. I constantly explain how iMessage isn't texting, but there are plenty of ways to get the same abilities.
And rightfully so. Corporations will find every conceivable way to track you and no API will be left unused, including tracking MAC addresses of bluetooth devices around you, which is a relatively easy one.
However, you can absolutely allow an app to access that API so it can scan for those MACs.
Funny thing, as soon as the API is locked down and presented as an option to the user, companies stop using it since nobody wants to give bluetooth access to i.e. Facebook.
In practice it's usually at or more commonly under 100m. Since we're at the mercy of what Axon has graciously provided for us, were unlikely to get BLE long range (coded PHY) type packets out of these devices, they probably have no use case for supporting the extension.
Edit: Okay I think I figured it out. Using an app called BLE Radar (F-Droid Link and Google Play link) you can scan nearby Bluetooth devices passively. You can use the app to setup filters to send notifications when specific devices or addresses are nearby.
Yup, that's it. BLE Radar is the best app I've found so far. Someone go make a PR for playing a sound when a profile matches though...
Tasers, bodycams and holsters among other things made by Taser are constantly spamming advertising packets over BLE in order to be able to link to each other quickly (ie if a taser or gun is drawn, turn on the body cam). These devices are almost all made by one company and per the Bluetooth specification, the manufacturer ID is the first three bytes of the device ID, 00:25:DF: the address for Axon International Torture Devices.
A couple notes in practice: without dedicated hardware BLE advertising packets are very random, your phone can only sense one of the three advertising channels at once and it rotates though them. Additionally local band conditions (how many innocuous BLE devices are also around, WiFi, unrelated ISM stuff, other factors) can change sensitivity. BLE is a chaotic spammy protocol that likes to shout over itself. As a result, detections can happen the instant someone gets within ~100m of you, or they may not be detected for several seconds. Some departments may not even use Axon hardware at all, though the majority seem to. You may be able to use the WiGLE database to get a sense for your locale, but I haven't dug into that yet.
Further research:
This has a lot of potential for protest/protected first amendment activities.
As stated, the ability to cue an audio alert. Apps that can trigger audio/video recording when cops are very close (high RSSI). Apps that can alert a friend that lots of cops are very close and the user is unable to halt a countdown. Apps that can wipe/lock/turn off a phone if lots of cops are very close or around for an extended period of time (in custody).
One thing I'm curious about is of using a micro controller with a much larger receiver would extend BLE sniffing capabilities.
Or setting up some LoRa equipped micro controllers to do sniffing in an area and syncing that data using a LoRa mesh to an active database of some kind. (Like utilize something similar to (or in fact) Meshtastic)
Meshtastic is awesome, everyone go play with it, it's getting more accessible by the day.
There's a lot you can do on the hardware side. A device with three BLE chips supporting the appropriate modes would be able to sniff all three advertising channels at once, greatly increasing acquisition speed. High gain directional antennas would massively increase range. If you were especially squirrelly you could build in a GPS with high precision timing (~$25-100) and geolocate the packets via MLAT (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-range_multilateration). Moving up to a GPSDO you could start to do things like determine the speed and direction of travel of the sender.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I'd love an active community here on lemmy for Meshtastic. One of those hasn't had a post for 2 months and the other has a single post from an admin and that's it.
yeah, they aren't very active, but (presumably due to federation bugs) there is more there than your instance is showing you: from my perspective the most recent post on the mander community is from one month ago and the lemmy.ml community has three posts including one that isn't from a mod.
you might be able to pull those posts into your instance by searching for their permalinks there (which you can find from the fediverse icons on each post in the web view of those communities on another instance).
