@MoonshineMidnight Holland used Pegasus to track, surveil and arrest Ridouan Taghi, its all online you can read about it. So yes they are using it. They also used a lot of dirty tricks(some even illegal) to hack into phones.
Reagarding the pic above, the first part just says that they tracked his physical movement and by that matched the owner to the device (by matching physical movement with cell tower connections), and that they put a ON device tool (pegasus). What worries me is the second part (clone) because I personally know of a similar hack of a e2e phone by the Dutch with creating cloned server/device so what I read above on the link i think might be true, can @Cantseeleft share more info where he got the article? Frequent updates also reminds me of that hack.
@MoonshineMidnight whats your opinion on this scenario? You buy a pixel phone cash, install grapheneos on your own manually, verify with audtior, put an anonymous "DATA only esim" with bitcoin, install VPN and only use signal and never open any links online/ accept files, browse the internet.
The imei will be logged on the cell tower but its just one imei between many, they cannot see who is the owner of that imei and they cannot see what you are actually doing on that phone, just that you are connected to VPN.
Btw imo there is no other way to use celluar data without connecting to a cell tower, even if you buy a small portable router that router has to have a sim card and be connected to cellular tower in order to broadcast wifi, and you have to move it with you around so its kinda the same thing. Just one device plus. I see no point.