  Since 1998 the GSM security has been academically broken but no real attack
has ever been done until in 2008 when two engineers of Pico Computing (FPGA
manufacture) revealed that they could break the GSM encryption in 30 seconds
with 200'000$ hardware and precomputed rainbow tables. Since then the hardware
was either available for rich people only or was confiscated by government
agencies. So Chris Paget and Karsten Nohl decided to react and do the same
thing but in a distributed open source form (on torrent). This way everybody
could "enjoy" breaking GSM security and operators will be forced to upgrade the
GSM protocol that is being used by more than 4 billion users and that is more
than 20 years old.
