Posted on 08/11/2006 10:28:49 PM PDT by DannyTN
(TV5) -- While FBI agents pour into Caro another incident breaks out in Gratiot County. At approximately 11:35am August 11th police were called to the Dollar General Store in Ithaca after a" clerk in Ithaca became suspicious after two men came into the store, and became upset when they were turned down while trying to buy several disposal cell phones.
TV5's Mike Terry spoke with the clerk who called police. She said they were two "Middle Eastern" men and said they've been coming into the store weekly and buying disposable cell phones. She said the same thing was happening at the dollar general store in Alma.
You might think the clerk became suspicious because of what was going on in Caro but when we asked the clerk she said she wasn't even aware of what was going on.
The policy at their store is that they can only sell two cell phones, per person, per day. She saw the men put the phones in the trunk of the car and when she thought they were coming back in, she called 9-1-1.
We did talk to Ithaca police while there has been no crime committed-they do want to find these men, and run their names against government watch lists.
LOL!
Oh... one more comment to the wristwatch thing....The big difference between a watch and a cell phone is that a cellphone battery can set off an electric blasting cap. A watch battery can't... making the cell phone more practical.
Wanna bet?
How much you wanna bet that a wristwatch cannot be used as a timer for any device? Let's say a microwave oven, or a kitchen range, or a water heater (I'm running out of ideas for MAJOR power sinks).
Ever hear of a "relay"? Or an "SCR"? Or a "switching transistor"?
They'd get too many false-positives. LOTS of people use a cell phone as their only phone. And for an elderly shut-in on fixed income, who "doesn't get out much", that phone isn't going to move very much (but it will be plugged in via "wall-wart" so that it can stay ON all the time, in case a call comes in.)
There would be a pattern to this, that could be observed at the central cell sites. A phone in the tracfone category would appear on the local roaming database (it has to check in with the cell periodically to let the cell know it is there to get calls), and would stay there day after day, never ever making or getting calls.
I know that there are people, lots of 'em, who fit that profile -- honest, law-abiding people. Trying to pick the tangoes out of that mix would be like trying to pick flyspecks out of a peppershaker.
Now, in theory, they could try to build a database of "residential" and "non-residential" locations, and then cross-reference low-activity "registered" phones to that database, but by the time that got that database constructed, and the queries coded and debugged (including the interface code)... well, it'd be far into the "too late to do any good" timeframe.
A tracphone doing this, sitting stationary at a major public site. would be a possible indication of trouble.
Drug dealers use these phones a few times and then throw them away. It keeps them from being tapped. The police get a warrant for one number and it's gone the next day.
The same is true of terrorists. The Trac phone makes it hard to listen in on their conversations. The police/FBI can't get warrants fast enough.
These phones could be used for terrorism or pretty much any other illegal activity that requires untraceable communications.
Make a call and then sell the phone and its remaining minutes for what you paid or a slight profit. Voila! Free, untraceable phone calls; A must for all drug dealers and terrorists!
What to do about it? Allow the feds to monitor traffic without warrants and arrest anyone who is plotting terrorism . Oh... Isn't that what the Dems have been whining about?
Oh and your "database" is as close as, say, Microsoft Streets and Trips. A terrorist is unlikely to set a bomb at Granny's house, but may want to do so at an overpass.
No, but Ithaca is just 12 miles north of Detroit, ... and the lovely, exotic city of Dearborn.
My point was: LONG duration (i.e. long term power source reliability & no need to charge up thousands of batteries). Not cell phone battery, road-side bomb, type duration/reliability for a very limited number of devices.
They must laugh at us with: "These folks (Dems) love Power and hate Bush soooo much, that they're willing to kill their own people by talking to us via the NY Times".
My point on that was merely that a watch battery can't supply enough current to set off a blasting cap by itself ..
I didn't say that it couldnt be used as a timer in a larger, bulkier systm.
Tapping these messages in on a handheld is too laborious to be as pedantic as it appears is necessary to communicate with some, so I'll just give up trying.
Past my bedtime anyway.
One last comment....I have more real experience with explosives than 99.999 % of FReepers...
(ever heard of T.E.R.A. in Socorro, NM???)
Although admittedly it has been 10 years since my last bit of work in that field, so my expertise is a little dated.... but i doubt that the basic principles have changed that much.
I got your point. I was answering your question.
"Why do this you are going to re-sell the phones for normal consumer use?"
No reason. They aren't going to resell them to anybody except other islamic neerdowells.
There. I fixed it.
It is technologically possible. They would need a list of all of the electronic serial numbers (ESN's) of the phones (each is unique to the phone). Then they would have to get every single wireless provider who provides that particular type of digital service (CDMA, TDMA, or GSM) to deny all those phones in their switch data bases. A Herculean task of incredible proportions.
The amount of manpower required from the service providers for this would be staggering. The ESN's are 8 to 10 digit alpha numeric numbers that usually need to be entered by hand one at a time. There may be a few carriers who have the capability of taking a file (in the right format) and downloading all into the switch at once, but most would have to be input one at a time.
Add to that the fact that you would probably need a court order which would be sure to be held up and contested by Tracphone and the service providers (because they are going to lose major revenue if this is done, not to mention ticking off a whole bunch of innocent customers) and I think the likelyhood of shutting them all down is close to zero. The more likely scenario is to get a court order for a specific batch that were bought at one store at one time, like the ones in this article, and deny those phones. Once a phone is denied like that the only number that is capable of being dialed from the phone is 911.
reference bump...
Store it up in a capacitor then dump it out of said capacitor.
As for "Herculean task"... nonono. There is one home record for the phone. When the phone roams, the home record is fetched from whatever the home cell is, and copied to the cell that it roamed to. It would be the same amount of effort as killing the account.
They're also used for "secure" communications. Telephone calls can be "bugged" by the good guys (of course, that would be us, but the Treason Times would scream of the evils of this), but they need a telephone number, or a person's name to watch for traffic. If someone has a bunch of untracable cell phones (disposable, all paid with cash), he could talk without worrying about being bugged, since there's no way that the good guys would know what number he's talking on. And if they're using those phones for just one or two conversations at each end, then getting rid of the phones, there's no way to listen in on the conversations.
Which is just one of the many reasons to hate the Treason Times, for revealing the fact that the government might be listening in.
Mark
Then the watch probably wouldn't run.
I'm talking basic, direct power here and you all seem to want to go all "Rube Goldberg" on me.
Exaclty LVM.I'm guessing they are planning simultaneous explosions.Car bombs,mass transit,roadsides,suicide,etc.,,Things that haven't been done on US soil yet.
BINGO
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