Something a little close to home from Jacob Appelbaum‘s talk at the Chaos Computer Congress in Hamburg yesterday. During a section about GSM spoofing equipment used by the NSA, he mentions one epic fail by the UK GCHQ.

Apparently they set up fake GSM equipment at the Ecuadorian embassy in London (where Julian Assange has been living for the last 1.5 years) and it was greeting users with “Welcome to Uganda Telecom” messages due to being mis-configured or not being reconfigured after being used in Uganda.

I can’t find any other sources for that story, but crazier things have happened so it seems entirely plausible to me. It certainly makes you wonder about what kind of things are going on next door in Kenya!