Your Cellphone is a Homing Device

Legal Affairs ^ | May/June 2003 Issue | Brendan I. Koerner

[Geritol]

there are stories of the cell company being able to turn on your phone and for police to be able to use it as a remote microphone. I am sure that it is not technically impossible to do this if the phone is powered. I am also sure it is not impossible for the cell company to turn on the gps positioning remotely, if the phone is powered.

What I do not know is if the phones actually support these functions, or which ones do and which ones do not. As mentioned above, the police do not want to give away any of their nifty tricks before an elected official works to make them explicitly illegal, and I can not blame them. Also as mentioned before, there are capabilities and functions technically doable that the phones themselves are not designed to facilitate - yet. And others that they are.

[Geritol]

The concept of anonymity is hard to achieve in actual practice. As soon as you take the anonymous phone to your home or office, correlations start to multiply. Who calls and is called, locations, times, it all adds up eventually. You would have to use the phone, maybe each phone, only once or twice maybe. The phones would have to be purchased in a place without cameras, at a parking lot without cameras, etc. Gets very expensive to interract with technology anonymously, and it is getting more and more impossible.

[El Gato]

I have a SamSung (from Sprint). The manual says you can turn off the location feature, for all but E911 purposes. Even if they didn't have GPS, they could triangulate the signal if they had angle measuring capability at the towers and still know fairly well where you where, except out in the boonies where there might only be one tower in line of sight. And there are probably other ways, involving differential ranging (like GPS does).

One thing that really frosts me is that I can find no way to get out the GPS information so I could know where I am! Might be possible through the digital port which can also be used to connect to PC or PDA.

[Ditter]

Same here, I want the police to be able to find me if I ever get locked in the trunk of my car. (I drive a Tahoe & it doesn't have a trunk but you know what I mean)

[Ditter]

Your phone came with a black helicopter? Mine came with a spiffy new tin foil hat. I'll bet your phone cost more than mine.

[El Gato]

Hughes, which owns all the GPS satellites

The US Department of Defense owns the GPS satellites. The Russians own a constellation of similar GLONASS satellites. I don't think that Hughes even built the GPS satellites. I think that was a branch of Rockwell International, which is now part of Boeing

[Doctor Stochastic]

Sort of like a movable map that says "You Are Here."

[Fester Chugabrew]

"You can turn the "tracking" feature OFF on my cell phone. It is the users option to have it on or off."

Hehe. The Placebo Switch.

[RS]

"They pick some phone at random in a car on the road and calculate it's speed on that given stretch of road"


I hadn't heard that... wonder if they automatically issue a ticket ?

Is the traffic map available on the net somewhere ?

[NewsJunqui]

The reason why you don't get the the GPS readout is that the phone usually can't figure out all the information it needs to report the location. Most of the GPS type phones are really "Assisted GPS".

Since the cellphone antenna is not optimal for GPS reception (your phone has to be within view of at least 3 GPS satellites), the phone reports measurements on what it can see. The network then uses the information reported by the phone to determine the location. The network know which cell tower you are communicating through, so it can get fairly close, and then use the additional information reported by the phone to get a better location.

[mongrel]

Even with the current technology, the problem is less with the police as it is with black market readers that will inevitably come. I don't know the details, but I assume that 911 services will have some sort of reader like caller id that includes location info when you call. Additionally, i wonder if there is also something that can call the phone and get location without making a phone call.

If these readers are distributed to thousands of counties across the country, it won't be long til someone figures out how to crack them and distribute them on the internet.

The only way I could think of to stop this would be if the cell phone companies have some sort of software that actually blocks where the data is sent, but eventually even that could be spoofed.

I don't know much about this and if I'm all wet, let me know.

[1FreeAmerican]

I can buy a cell phone from a vending machine at the 7-11. The number is brand new as it relates to me but it is still anonymous to everyone else. You would have to monitor thousands of phones and it would take alot more than a few calls on that phone for a corelation. Cameras rerecord over the same tape every few hours, I think.

[A CA Guy]

They could always check the records to find what cell site transmitted and received calls and when.

[inquest]

What I don't understand is what's to stop anyone from picking up your cellphone signals even when you don't have any kind of special feature on your phone. When it's on, it's constanly transmitting, right?

[Geritol]

yep, that is why I have invested in so many reflective mylar containers. And the wife just thinks I have a chip fetish....

Also encouraged me to buy a blender, but not one that good. It was truly to die for.

But my main defense is the fact that I carry no designer items daily. The goons would have a hard time being equipped to replace my belt, pen, etc. with clones with homing devices.

[keats5]

Great. Now everyone will know what a boring life I lead.

[PoorMuttly]

Just do what Muttly do...and send your cell phone off in a taxi in the opposite direction !