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Cell phones used to track traffic
scm alerted us to a story in the San Jose Mercury News about some new technology which uses the reflected signals from cell phones to map traffic patterns. But it also seems to be able to track individual users as well by mapping those reflections to their physical location. Wonder which use will be the most "valuable"?
The KCBS news radio version of the story told of a subscription service that would call the cell phone of every subscriber who was headed into traffic congestion to warn them of it.
(Just what you need - a cell phone call to distract you as you approach the turn behind which traffic is stalled...)
Seems to me that makes it obvious that the system knows perfectly well where each customer is, indexed by the phone's identification.
The cells have always been able to locate you within a couple miles - by signal strength. This was necessary to select the cell that handled your calls. A little hardware and software upgrade to each cell makes it possible to know your location within feet.
Knowing your location within miles is enough for phone calls, but not particularly useful to the police for tracking or apprehension. Knowing it within feet serves both purposes.
But knowing it within feet requires a hardware and software upgrade to essentially ALL the cell base stations - an upgrade that isn't necessary for their mission. That CO$T$.
So the government is mandating the instalation of the extra equipment. And they're looking for an excuse to make it palatable. Traffic statistics is their latest trial balloon.
I don't know what it's like where YOU live. But here in the S.F. Bay area there are already cameras watching traffic along all the major freeways and many non-freewayintersections (and which were often rotated to look at the surrounding neighorhoods, until it was noticed and commented on), under-pavement speed sensors ditto to control the metering lights, regular helicopter patrols during rush hours (which is much of the day here) by both the police and services feeding the radio stations, and police helicopter patrols much of the night.
All that confiscated money and property has bought a LOT of "cop equipment".
They need more traffic info from an expensive forced hardware and software tap on the cell phone systems about as much as Custer needed more Indians. (And how DO you separate "traffic congestion" from people with cell phones walking?)
But for tracking a suspect - or anyone else they don't like who happened to have a cellular phone - it's ideal.
A system that measures the location of the phones closely enough to monitor traffic - and call the phones of particular people who are approaching "traffic congestion" - can provide such tracking information on individuals, with no more than a minor software addition at a central site. Nothing is detectable outside the site except the polling of the cell phones - and the "traffic" application give them an excuse for that.
Anyone who tries to capture and reverse engineer the central site software to audit it for individual-tracking capability can expect the same treatment as Mitnick. So don't expect to find out about the individual-tracking capability until it's been in regular use for so long that they don't mind exposing it.
By the way: Did you know that some of the popular cell-phone models can be turned into room bugs by remote control?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Does that mean that a dead-halt traffic jam will look exactly the same as a responsible driver pulling over to use the phone?
Mapping where someone's Cell Phone can and does save lives. People stuck in mountains, snow, and other places where the owners of the phone don't know where they are. If they can't keep track of you by phone number, then what is the big whoop?
Linux O Muerte!
Here in Minnesota we were smart enough to put sensors under the roads, and these are all hooked up to MDOT, Minnesota Department of Transportation. No need for a gunkulator when a simple sensor will do the trick. See for you self.
d _template.cgi?zone=dot
http://www.startribune.com/news/traffic/cgi/loa
Bone heads will always find a more expensive way to do things when they can get money.
Is the ability of the government/law enforcement/whoever to track where you are a good thing? Well.. the gut feeling is 'no.. that tramples on my righrs, right?'
Let me pose a different perspective.
First, regarding the cellular phone tracking stuff. Well.... You *are* using a phone that *broadcasts* over RF, which is an inherently *public* medium, and physics says there are ways to locate you if your signal can be isolated. So...scientifically speaking.. you do *NOT* have a reasonable expectation that your location is hidden. Now.. yes, the telco records that say what the signature of your phone is, your ESN, things like that.. should *ABSOLUTELY* be private. That's beteween you and your cel provider... but aside from that.... anyone with the right gear can know that a) someone is using a phone nearby and b) where they are.
So.. should this information be in the hands of the government only? Traffic reporters only? No...
it should be publicly available to anyone. ie: how many calls are going on I98? Hwy#4? How dense? Sure... as long as the database is *publicyly funded* and *publicly* available, and not monoploized.
As I understand it.. analog phones emit a constant carrier/beacon/whatever.
Digital phones only receive, except when they periodically send out signals to keep things working right, let the system know where they are, etc.. (one reason you get SOO Much more battery life out of a phone in digital mode)
From the article (my emphases):
It requires that users have a new phone equipped with the GPS technology but allows users to turn the locating system on and off at their leisure, bringing home the issue of privacy for the cell phone user.
With U.S. Wireless' system, the phone is always being tracked, Cunningham said.
``It's constantly monitoring location,'' Cunningham said. ``With ours, it's only working when you want it to. You push the button when you want to be found.''
Brunato says the RadioCamera system doesn't recognize the phone user for traffic management purposes.
``It has no idea of whose phone it is or the number,'' he said. ``Compare it to a helicopter flying overhead monitoring traffic. It can see all the cars and how fast they're moving but has no idea who is driving that car. It just sees the traffic.''
Sure, you Americans have all reason to be paranoid about everything, I grant you that. But every technology has potential to be applied to both "good" and "evil". This one seems useful enough for you guys to take the risk.
Me, I'd be surprised if it reached this tropical hellhole called Brazil within the decade. Heh.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I doubt it. No information is being extracted from the conversation.
This is analogous to someone saying simply 'someone is on the phone on this line'. Does that constitute tapping?
As for the silly us 'wiretapping' laws....
What idiot decided that radio broadcasts on standard modulation were in any way 'private'?
I believe here in the Great Empire of Canada, any cel conversation can be intercepted legally, as there is *no* reasonable expectation of privacy, because it is wireless.
They're making a very error-prone assumption that cell phones are distributed uniformly, or at least approximately uniformly, throughout the Bay Area. I will guarantee you that a jam in downtown of San Jose will be reported even if there's a slight slowdown, and a jam around some less well-off areas (e.g. south SF) is quite likely to go completely unnoticed. And it appears more or less impossible to make adjustments for this; so what data comes out of this system should be double checked at the very least.
// zyqqh
Just to give a sense of how much information is already available online, here's a current incident report from the California Highway Patrol:
So getting simple traffic data from cell phones is totally unnecessary and inferior to the systems in place.
I don't have all the specific details for either system, but based on experience I can tell you that:
a) The system in place in LA is partial and expensive.
b) LA is far ahead of most cities, especially relative to the East coast, particularly Philadelphia. The way this cellphone system is described, it could be implimented on the cheap, and without having to mobilize PennDOT (et. al) to get off their asses and do something.
c) A high resolution (per car) system, such as the one described in the article, could be extremely usefull in designing proper freeways. You could get a computer to analyze how each cars interact with one another at particular on and offramps, intersections, etc on a LARGE scale (I don't know of any other system that can claim this). Imagine if you could collect and compile computer data over a period of a month showing that 99% of cars merge left, cutting across traffic, resulting in slowdowns of 20%....you get the point. There are many freeways in Philly, where, for nominal expenses (e.g., traffic light, divider, better lanes, bumping it up a few feet, etc.), they could redesign the traffic flow and alleve traffic concerns considerably, using this type of data.
/* disclaimer: I'm not a crypto buff */
k ing/gsm-secur.html
GSM cell phones are more than just the GSM voice encoding algorithm. These other security measures include: Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK) digital modulation, slow frequency hopping, and Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) time slot architecture. While i'm aware that they can be broken, it's not nearly as trivial as using a simple modified CB radio scanner. For more information, check out:
http://www.semionoff.com/cellular/hacking/phrea
If there's traffic congestion, there will be more people, increasing the likelihood that there's a cellphone in use. Congestion causes delays, making it more likely that cell phones will be in use.
If there are no cell phones to track, chances are good that there's no congestion, which is also useful information.
The ambitions are: wake up, breathe, keep breathing.
Another tool for the Big Brother and his Revenue Collection Gestapo^H^H^H^H^LAW ENFORCEMENT officers to use against us!
I'll just remain out of touch thank you. That way I can actually pay attention to what's going on down the roadway here. And I can avoid all those morons who are cruising at 80mph in their little SUVs and yakking away.
What? Me? Prejudiced against cellular-totin', SUV drivin' fools? DAMN STRAIGHT!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I happen to live in PA, but I have a beach house in NJ. Having driven through there numerous times, and being stopped by their cops (who are all too happy to give out tickets), I can tell you that they've never even attempted to give me a ticket for such a thing, even when they've seen me do it. I'm aware that there is a Bill pending, but on last check it is in NJ's Assembly Committee on Transportation. Furthermore, I suspect an outright ban will never pass. Many states are pushing for such legislation, but they'll probably merely ban the use of hand helds (e.g., you can only use it if it's on speaker phone in a cradle). Which I basically agree with.
Much better! My only complaint is about your use of first and second instead of car and cadr. Also, if you're having RAM problems, you might want to consider a smaller dialect such as Scheme, for which there are many excellent interactive systems available as Free Software. Scheme is also conceptually nicer and easier to learn (The Revised[5] Report on Scheme is only 50 pages, about the same size as the index of Common Lisp: the Language).
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
What, do you think that prior to this product announcement, it was impossible to track you around by your cell phone?
We can't have it both ways, folks; if we want to have the freedom to do whatever we want with any radio transmission we pick up, then we cannot say that the government shouldn't be able to do the same.
If you don't want to be tracked, don't broadcast.
If you want to broadcast, resign yourself to the fact that you can be tracked.
This is nothing really new. The technology for the location of cellular phones has been around since they were first implemented.
e /1zs01!.pdf
e ssions.pdf
A pilot project to asses the viability of doing this in Washington DC was underway in 1994.
http://www.itsdocs.fhwa.dot.gov/jpodocs/repts_t
A panel discussion was held at the recent Transportation Research Board meeting in Washington DC (Concurrent session No. 414). Unfortunately notes from panel discussions are seldom published.
http://www.nationalacademies.org/trb/ftp/am/All_S
For those worried about their cars being tracked, I suggest starting at:
http://www.its.dot.gov/
Intelligent Transportation Systems are currently a multi billion dollar area of research. With any luck, in some years time you wont be able to get a speeding ticket, because you wont be driving. It will be too dangerous for humans to drive on the highways of the future - they don't have dependable reactions.
Regards,
-Jeremy
I worked briefly on a project with the Memphis/Shelby County 911 office. They wanted to develop an application that would pinpoint the location of a person making a call to 911 from a cellular phone. They have had troubles in the past locating people on cell phones, primarily because the person calling may not know the nearest address or street intersection. Another motive behind this project was to help filter calls from people about traffic accidents. In some cases they might get 30 calls from cell phone users concerning a single traffic incident. With the proper mapping technology, they could pinpoint the caller and send a message saying "if you are calling about the accident at such and such intersection, we are taking care of it. if you have an emergency, please stay on the line". Kind of interesting applications but I took another job before they got too far along in the development.
I'm sorry, but why is that? I can't see what's wrong with keeping my default score of 2.
If there is actually a good reason for doing this, I'd be happy to do so.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Wouldn't it just be better to track the cars themselves moving? Is it really so much more difficult to mount a few radar systems up at strategic places to detect the speed of traffic? For that matter, why can't the satellites track traffic? Hell, supposedly the government can pinpoint a individual walking with one of them, so why not do something actually useful with them? Heck, why not put those "black" helicopters to use to? I know their there, keeping an eye on us, so why not product some helpful data while they are spying anyway?
Besides, all the dicks with the cell phones are the ones driving their bmw's and mercedes' shitty, driving off on the side of the road illegally and thus don't represent actually traffic anyway.
The 1994 pilot was an analog-only system that used an array of eight antennas feeding eight digital receivers, which in turn fed a whole load of DSP hardware. Once the receiver was tuned, the DSP would do a load of math on the incoming signals and use the phase differences to determine where they were coming from. There were also algorithms to weed out multipath, leaving a single, strong signal to be used in taking a bearing. The goal of the first test was to keep an eye on the DC Beltway from I-270 to Alexandria. To do this, we co-located the DF equipment at eight cell sites around the Beltway. The MTSO (mobile telephone switching office) would give us a feed of calls entering and leaving the cells we covered (each DF site could cover many cells, and some overlapped). Three or four sites were scheduled to get a bearing on the call, and if the phone was located in our area of interest, it was tracked periodically until it left. The resulting location, direction and speed information was then fed back to a Traffic Information Center where a map of the Beltway displayed relative speeds for each segment.
Nothing was actually done with information about the phone itself, but there was a great deal of interest in using a similar system for enhanced 911 services. The project was eventually sold off to Grayson Wireless, who turned it into this product. There's a description of how it works here. It's kind of cool to see that a lot of the concepts we built into the prototype seven years ago are still around.
A small number of samples is enough to estimate the traffic state using their doppler shift. For example, if there is even one cellphone at 60MPH out of hundreds of vehicles on a given section of road it is very unlikely that traffic is jammed. While it is possible that some vehicles will drive much slower than others if you get just two or three 8MPH doppler signatures and no higher ones you probably have slow traffic.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
With the recent illegalization of cell phone use on the road, this technology may prove to be totally worthless, save for the few that want to be ticketed.
Dan
So does this mean that my daily traffic 'copter I listen to on the way to work will become obsolete?
How entirely accurate could this be? This based on the errant assumption that all the traffic on the highways consists of yuppie puppies yacking away while driving (which is illegal in many urban areas--cell phoning while driving...not yuppies)...
Why not just stick with the good ole' traffic copters?
--snake
Come on, Tinkler, Tink!!
I want to be the guy in the control booth who sees the two 95 mph dots heading towards each other, see them meet, see the dots dissappear, and see them appear again at 0 mph as each calls his/her lawyer.
Conventional wisdom states that cell-phone users get into more accidents and have less control over their speed; I wonder how this will affect the data.
-AC
The systems you mention may work very well but they have tremendous costs. I suggest you try calculating the cost of a weatherproof monitoring unit, communication and power infrastructure and of course the labour costs. Don't forget to multiply that by hundreds of units and add in the maintenance costs.
Now consider the alternative offered by RadioCamera:
a relatively small number of units cover a large ares. Furthermore, they are installed in existing cell sites that have all the necessary infrastructure. These systems can easily be afforded by places that are not as well off as California.
I would expect that slashdot readers should know by now that silicon is cheaper than infrastructure.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
http://www.usw corp.com/USWCMainPages/Applications/its_whitepaper .htm
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Well true, the person in the control center can't tell who it is, but for example, they can tell who is speeding. With that information, they can tell a squad car in the area about the heading of the speeder and presto! some guy got a speeding ticket. This has been used before with bridges and helicopters, and this new technology will make it easier/cheaper to grab speeders. Whether this is good or bad, it's not for me to decide, but I defienetly seems to cut down on my freedom.
"To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia." -- Sun Ra
So you're freedom to break the law should be protected? ok..... You bring upon yourself if you speed. Hell, I'd be happy if there was more tickets for people going 80 in a 65 zone.
Why not pass legislation that forces all vehicles to report their velocity and direction every n ticks of an onboard clock to a control tower? Then noone would know who what when where or why....well maybe where who when what but not why...
; }return(0);}
For privacy: any car entering an area is assigned a call sign, and when it exits that broadcast area its ID is handed-off to a new car coming in... *shrug* would make more sense then cell phones.
#include <signal.h> \ #include <stdlib.h> \ int main(void){signal(ABRT,SIGIGN);while(1){abort(-1)
OFTC: By the community, for the community
It doesn't take a mario andretti to drive at 80 on a perfectly straight empty four lane highway.
"To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia." -- Sun Ra
Why? Look at all the potential for good it has. Finding traffic jams before anyone even calls in. Locating someone who calls 911. This technology could improve our roads, even perhaps save lives.
But along with that comes the potential for abuse. And that abuse will happen, given enough time. Or at least, someone will certainly try to abuse it.
Right now, though, tracking people via cellphone isn't very practical. Each phone has a fingerprint, but you have to map fingerprints to individuals before you can track specific people, and I don't believe anyone has records of that sort (perhaps the phone company, but I'm not sure if they do). Without those records, you need to find the cellphone itself, which means finding the user, which renders the whole tracking pointless because you've already found the target.
Now, if our pals in the government were to require cellphone registration with the Feds, that's another matter entirely. I wonder when someone's going to try and get that bill passed...
I was under the impression that cell phones always send out signals in order to keep in contact with/find the nearest tower. So doesn't that mean that people don't even have to be talking for this to work? Could someone clarify this for me please.
"To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia." -- Sun Ra