I'm guessing in this context it means drain the battery. I haven't heard of this technique, but it seems plausible, by tricking the phone into constantly transmitting over WiFi or cell.
Couldn't you achieve the same by just enabling airplane mode or similar on regular devices? I don't think niche devices with hardware killswitches should be necessary
Guessing from things I've heard, take this with a grain of salt:
- In order for most cellular protocols to work successfully, it's necessary for the transmission power level (phone to tower and tower to phone) to be lowest possible.
- So that tx power has to be constantly modulated because the phone's distance is always changing as it moves, meaning the optimum power level is always changing.
- The tower is in control of this - it tells the phone how powerful to transmit, and this can be done for each device.
- So I would suppose a malicious party in control of the tower could simply tell the phone to transmit at max power, which will drain batteries quickly, especially if the connection is being actively used I guess. This may have interference considerations but if the tower is really a box on top of a car or truck it may not really matter.
- I don't know how the phone is prevented from connecting to closer non-malicious towers.
I could hazard a guess that if someone made your phone really hot it would be able to be scanned by thermal imaging and pick you out of a crowd. Just leave phones at home, like, use 18th century methods if you have to. I dont pretend to care or know why people would be interested in this, but like, your phone probably is not your friend in a protest