> In other words, the network decides whether traffic is encrypted and the user has no visibility into whether it is being encrypted. I'm pretty sure that it w

> In other words, the network decides whether traffic is encrypted and the user has no visibility into whether it is being encrypted. I'm pretty sure that it was intended that the OS UI would show you when your connection is unencrypted, but none of them do because that was undesired by state actors. Also, even if encryption is enabled it's only for the radio part of the data transmission, not handset -> handset. Otherwise you would not be able to make calls to landlines, so isn't it already trivial for a Network Operators to decrypt your raw data? It would help for scenarios like an embassy mounting a fake base station to grab data about protestors outside it, I suppose. Also, how can they tell if the encryption key is weakened by setting lots of bits to zero, like was done in the original version of GSM?