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FEMA To Use Cell Phone Signals To Find Survivors
twistah writes: "CNN had an interview with a representative of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency helping with the New York WTC rescue effort, who said that Lucent has given them technology to trace the signal of cell phones. The idea is that people will give them phone numbers of cell phones and pagers of people missing due to the WTC collapse, which FEMA will call and attempt to trace the signal to find the missing people. FEMA has now put this information on their web site, and are dubbing it the 'Wireless Emergency Response Team.'"
by now, any of those ppls' cell phone batteries have long since worn out.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
Actually, it would be nearly useless in this case. GPS signals are very, very weak and can blocked by as little as a sheet of aluminum foil or a few millimeters of water. A GPS receiver under all those tons of concrete and steel would never be able to aquire and track.
Someone with a very big clue realizes cell phone signals will be useful when rescue operations take place and convinces all the cell phone companies to shut down all the cell towers around the area of the disaster. That way, cell phones don't get any signal anymore and stop "talking" to the towers, therefore conserving battery energy. Afterward, during the rescue operations (now), cell towers are switched back on for a few minutes every 2 hours or so, and rescuers take advantage of these few minutes to scan the area for cell phone responses.
Buried victims who are still alive *and* still able to reach their cell phones *and* still able to think clearly enough realize that their cell phones may be useful to their future rescue, switch them off, then turn them on only a few minutes per day, to make a call, or hoping that someone will pick up their phones' signals.
These are the only two possibilities I can think of that would keep cell phones alive and somewhat usable so long after the tragedy. Sadly, I don't think either possibility is even remotely likely. Of course, I wish with all my heart that I'm wrong, and also that battery technology and power management are now advanced enough that lifes can be saved as a result.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Except in this case the location cached before the collision would be something like "1 World Trade Center, NE corner, floor 45 through 55". (GPS's vertical accuracy is much worse than it's horizontal accuracy.) Now add the fact that the nearest cell tower was on the roof, and it went offline immediately after the collision. Now add the fact that floors 45 through 55 are now laying in a pile with the other 100 floors. That cached position will likely be hundreds of feet from where the phone ended up - and that's assuming the person and phone ended up in the same place.
I'm not saying that GPS in cells phones is or isn't a good idea. All I'm saying is that it wouldn't be likely to have helped locate anyone in this case. The only way to find and rescue the people with those cell phones is to trianglate the signals from the phones.
Question - why use GPS at all? I'm sure that at any given location a mobile phone is in touch with more than one mobile transmitter within reach. Why could these not be adapted to triangulate the position of a mobile?
Instead, they're only trying to get a very general location of the phones, to determine whether they're at "Ground Zero" or not. If not, they could potentially be used to find if somebody's at a hospital in a coma, or if they somehow got out of NYC in time and for some reason haven't been able to contact someone.
These phones aren't really being used to locate the survivors, they're being used to gain some clue as to whether a person is buried, or might have survived. It won't do a great job of locating people, but it will help discriminate if a person is "likely dead" or "might have gotten away."
I also heard that no actual calls have to be made to trace a phone's location, but I'd guess that it must at least be turned on and able to receive a call. And yes, as many posters have said, batteries are going to be a problem this many days later. But any more information on what happened to these people will surely be welcomed by their families.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
But if it means even the slightest chance of preventing this kind of thing from happening again, I'd sacrifice some anonymity any day.
It is incredibly tragic that people are rewriting the bounds of freedoms at a moment of emotional upset (sort of like going grocery shopping when you're hungry): i.e. Western society has done just fine for quite a long time building the best society on the planet, and in a heartbeat people are willing to take it all away because of a single incident (BTW: Seems to me that we could just intrude in that freedom of religion worldwide and suddenly these problems wouldn't exist...you're willing to give that up right?). The reality is that government backdoors in encryption, and tracking for cellphones works to catch one single type of person: Idiots. If I were a criminal I would dream of a cell phone that sent the location (picked up by GPS...triangulation would be tougher but of course with simple relays you could get around that no problem as well. Maybe stick the cell retransmitter on top of a public bus and use it as a relay, ad nauseum) as I'd reverse engineer it to give a location several miles off: Keep the law busy for a while, and as we know law enforcement and intelligence has been FAR too much in love with technology as of late, so you can bet they would sit looking at their screen saying "Damnit he's got to be here! The screen says so! Look again!". It's hilarious that instead of intelligence or physical protective measures (such as secured doors on planes which are so dumbshit obvious that it boggles the mind) people look at the IDIOTIC (I mean mentally deficient. Seriously this gets me in a rage that people and their quest for the illusion of safety can be so god damn stupid) measures such as "Ban MS Flight Simulator!" or "Don't allow Arab men to buy one way tickets!", or "Let carnivore listen to all emails for secret words that'll give away the terrorists!". The illusion of safety, and then everyone can go back to their lives pretending that everything is hunky dory and they're just fine and have nothing to worry about because damnit the government has carnivore, backdoors in encryption that only law abiding people use (oh, also which organized crime uses to get at your information too while you're illusioned into thinking it's secure), and the right to cavity search any random Joe on demand....until the next attack occurs. Then you just have to reduce freedoms more right?
If you could get a cell phone to answer a special emergency incomming call, and if you could place a cell tower close to the site - you could do a triangulation of the vicem by setting up three loude noise makers spaced far appart. Each would trigger in sequece, and a triangulation could be made by determining how long the cellphone took to hear the noise. This would allow rescue workers to fin the locations of the phone - even if the GPS signal can't get to the phone, the noise could.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.