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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.'"
I was thinking about this the other day, but if people were frantically calling these cellphones then the battery would almost certainly be dead by now, and even if this were not the case my phone will only last about 4 days without getting charged as it would ramp up the power output to try and get a signal.
Hopefully this will be a good launching point for this technology in the future
Is that really viable at this point? Most cell phone batteries don't last for too many days, even while not in use. They'd last even less time if the owners were trying to use them to call for help like some of them did. Unfortunately most probably didn't get through because of the phone network jam that happened right afterwards...
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
For safety reasons cell phones are going to have GPS receivers in them soon to tell 911 operators where you are when calling on your cell phone. This would be totally useful here, because there are going to be a lot more cell phones in that pile of rubble than living people. While I agree with the privacy concerns (including my own) this would have been totally helpful here. (Especially since most cellphones don't have more than 3-5 days of battery life. They should all be running down by now).
-Sean
by now, any of those ppls' cell phone batteries have long since worn out.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
After so many hours, woulden't most cell phone batteries have run out by now. I hope I'm wrong.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I heard reports that there where several subteranian areas that have pockets that are open. This was followed up by saying that there where a lot of snack shops and the such that would have been stocked with food and drinks.
If someone was lucky enough to find themselves in this situation they could survive for quite awhile.
load "linux",8,1
The company I work for is doing the same thing. They haven't done it already because it's never been done before. With CDMA phones it's not as simple as looking for a specific frequency, they have to identify the phone by the code it uses to decode the signal.
People I work with have been working very hard to modify the basestation software to allow them to search for a particular phone. They are basically strapping a small base station to their back and walking around the rubble.
I also heard on CNN that they can use this "technology" with Palm Pilots as well, but they were very sketchy on the details.
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www.moneybythenumbers.com
Yes, there is a shopping mall below the WTC complex, as well as a PATH station and a NYC Subway station. I haven't heard anything on the news about how it held up under the weight of the collapse. It would seem that if it did hold, rescue workers could approach the site from below via the train tubes.
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www.moneybythenumbers.com
This is an attitude that can only come from someone who has studied very little history, and/or is too young to remember government abuses in the past.
The problem is that if you don't restrict and control the tools that governments have available to them, they will abuse them. It's human nature - if you were an FBI agent, wouldn't you use whatever tools you had at your disposal to track down bad guys? It's not far from there to doing what Sen. Joseph McCarthy was doing in the 1950s: tracking down people engaging in "un-American activities", the kind of term which of course is defined by whatever over-zealous government official is conducting such investigations.
There are countless cases of over-zealousness of prosecutors, police, and other officials, and to an extent, that's the way we want it - but that's exactly why there are laws and structures to keep these people in check, and to make sure they don't harrass people who are considered by law to be "innocent until proven guilty".
It might seem to make sense to give the government more leeway in this time of crisis, but even if it does make sense, any extra powers granted to them should be temporary, and only usable in pursuing terrorist activity. Otherwise, the terrorists will win in a much bigger way than they have already: they'll succeed in making the United States a place where the government abridges its citizens' freedoms, a place where many citizens may end up with good reasons to fear their government.
I've actually been at the Wireless Emergency Response call center most of the morning and am scheduled to go back 3am Monday. Yes, it may not be a good chance...but it's still a chance. You can still hear the horror in people's voices. Being in Georgia we've been so removed from the victums and family...being at the call center really brings it home...
I think you read it in "Rainbow 6", dude!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I do hate to say this, but a travisty of this magnitute will have some positive outcomes. Weither it be search and resuce tech and procedure, building arcitecture, or just plain people looking over their shoulder, this was necessacary for humanity to experience even though it blows. Look at the Titanic. Because of that, regulations were created to make sea travel safe.
= They say "guns don't kill people, people kill people", but I think the gun helps. -Eddie Izzard =
I was just in that basement area this past Sunday. It is the connection between the Church St. Subway Station and the PATH train to NJ and is better described as a nice train station rather than as a basement. There are several restaurants, a Borders Book Store, and various other things. It's like a small stretch of a shopping mall. I heard on the news that they are considering using the PATH tunnels to try to get people. In other news, though, my cell phone has never had any service down there.
They're trying to clear the subway tunnel under the building to see if anyone actually on the platform under the towers survived. The problem is that water mains have burst, flooding the tunnels and filling them with debris. At present I think they're a third of the way there.
Last night I dug up this passage from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and typed it in:
The Earth.
Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind. There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab--the supermarket was gone, everything in it was gone. Nelson's Column had gone! Nelson's Column had gone and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind--his mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustraphobia closed in on him.
England no longer existed. He'd got that--somehow he'd got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn't grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York was gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk forever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.
He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.
Of course, Dent's thoughts were of complete and utter physical destruction of the entire planet. However, the comparison is not totally unjustified since many of us feel that the entire culture of the world has changed in an irreversable way. In a sense, the old Earth is gone.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
A receiver would only tell the cell phone carrier where they were, it wouldn't tell the person on the other end of the line where they were.
With the current situation this would do no good. The survivors already know they are under a pile of rubble. GPS won't shed any new light for them.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
There are multiple ways to locate a cell phone or pager, and I suspect they will use all of them. Some have already mentioned GPS, that's rare to non-existant in today's devices. More likely are triangulation, or simple signal strength.
Several cell providers have been using triangulation to work towards the E911 requirements. Rather than implement expensive GPS solutions, they simply track a phone from multiple antennas, and triangulate the location of the phone from that. While normal accuracy is only +- a quarter mile, in an instance like this local portable cells could bet set up around the site and generate high accuracy.
Even if that can't be done, making a cell phone talk to the cell site (telling it to reregister, for instance) would allow you to listen for its signal with a strength meter. Walk away it reduces, walk towards it gets stronger. In a relatively small area like this it would work well.
Of course, there is also low tech. If they ring the phones, and make the area quiet, they can hear them ring. For those very near the surface this could be particularly effective.
Others have commented on batteries. Many cell phones are probably running low, but I would venture about 1/3 of today's phones last a week on standby, and would still be able to ring. Two way pagers and other communications devices often last longer, two weeks or more at a go. They could still have a huge number of these devices active. That said, they need to be careful. Ringing them too much will run out batteries.
I wish them luck, it's a good idea.
Perhaps, but there's another problem: air. You'd need a hole somewhere, or some sort of ventilation, or they'd have asphyxated by now.
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.
Unfortunately, it appears that a lot of those reports were rumors; a quick check of recent news finds that most of those reports were unverified. Depressing as hell.
BTW, I'd love it for someone to prove me wrong here. If you have any solid info, please, please, post.
Some people did try this once upon a time. As it turns out the electrical signal in a heartbeat is so weak that it gets drowned out in the natural background almost immediately. In fact, IIRC, you'd be better off with a directional mic trying to listen for heartbeats (which isn't very good either).
One of the companies trying to do this stuff did actually develop a device for something like $50,000 but independant testing showed they were essentially a fraud. Whether the device said there was a heartbeat in a particular direction was purely a function of how the operator was holding and using it, and had no relation to actual heartbeats.
After that fiasco the whole idea pretty much got thrown out.
This is an incredible story about some of the amazing new military technology we've got.
We'll need it, too, if this guy is right. It's a well-written essay.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
According to CNN/Yahoo, Colin Powell basically got them to agree to cooperate with any "reply" to terrorist efforts...in other words, roll your tanks and fly your planes over the country.
Actually the Arabs are a people that originated in the peninsula, but has spread much further. They occupy Africa north of the Sahara and the arabian peninsula including most of Iraq. Turkey and Iran are non arab states, despite being moslem and somehow also find moustashes cool. There are plenty of christian arabs, especially around Israel. But I digress.
I hope no countries will be destroyed, so I'm not so concerned about how best to rebuild them later. Why the Saudis would be interested in cleaning up that mess, I have no idea.
In the case of Afhganistan, it's already pretty much as destroyed as it can be. If we somehow could get a halfway decent government installed that brought peace there, and gave'em a few $B to clean up the place, I suspect we'd have a very friendly Afganistan for a long time. That's easier said than done, though.
Anyway, I just wanted to nail you for ingorance. Mission accomplished. Maybe it was a bit silly, but it felt good.
By the time enough red tape had been cut through to get permission or instructions to the fighters to actually shoot down a civilian airliner it would probably have been too late even if the fighters had already been circling the towers and the Pentagon.
I'd like to hear if anything more came of reports mentioned once or twice late Tuesday/early Wednesday that some witnesses reported a smaller plane following the one that hit the Pentagon.
Perhaps someone who knows more about airplanes than do I could offer an opinion as to whether a fight over the controls of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania or some deliberate sabotage by the airline's pilot or other aircrew member could have resulted in damage of some sort to the wing that would have sent it plummeting to the ground without any need for outside intervention?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
...who reflexively twitched at the naming of FEMA?
Too much Deus Ex, I guess...
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
If anybody found it offensive I offer my deepest, sincerest apologies.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Do you have a source for this? I haven't seen it reported... FBI had reported that it knew the planes had been hijacked, but "since these sorts of events normally end peacefully" it hadn't taken any action.
Probably the fighters had been sent up to investigate after air traffic controllers had figured out that something was wrong, but at that point the real purpose of the hijackings probably wasn't known or suspected.
Probably not suspected... flights had been off course and not hailing for 30 minutes, so were assumed hijacked, but it's hard to believe anything was responding. An in-flight F-16 would probably be cruising at 5-600mph, and could reach 1400mph within 15-20 seconds, meaning that "70 miles away" would have been 3 1/2 minutes away. At that distance, air-to-air missles would have been possible, and after the first tower had been hit, there would have been some discussion of this option. Recent reports from Cheney indicate that it wasn't discussed until after the Pentagon was hit.
However, there were nearly 16 minutes between the WTC impacts. It is plausible that an already airborne military craft would have made it to the vicinity in time for the second attact, but nothing off the ground would have been able to get there... it takes 10-15 minutes to scramble a plane up from strip alert, and we didn't have any sitting on alert at the time...
an opinion as to whether a fight over the controls of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania or some deliberate sabotage by the airline's pilot or other aircrew member could have resulted in damage of some sort to the wing that would have sent it plummeting to the ground
Flight 93 hit the ground at over 500mph, indicating that it was under power and, likely, undamaged. While the flight crew was likely to know how to cause enought damage -- even from outside the cabin -- to down the plane, this suggests that there was a stuggle for the cabin. As well, keep in mind that there were calls from the plane -- including Barbara Olson's call to her husband -- within five minutes of the downing. None of these calls to my knowledge reported damage to the craft.
If you could get a cell phone to answer a special emergency incomming call,
You can. As part of the process of connecting a call the cell towers send a message to the phone, asking it to tell them where it is ("Joe, can you hear me?"). The phone responds with a short transmission ("I'm Joe and I hear you!"), and the cell towers that hear the response can measure the signal quality and decide which one has the best signal path to the phone. Then THAT one places the call. If none have an adequate signal the call isn't placed, so the phone doesn't ring.
This means your phone can be "pinged" and located without it doing anything to notify you. If you haven't added an external detector (i.e. diode and piezo sounder) to detect the transmission you won't know it's being done.
I understand that law enforcement agencies already have equipment to do this. Perhaps this is what they're bringing.
and if you could place a cell tower close to the site
For "cell tower" read "small box of test equipment with a little antenna at a known point."
- 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.
Simpler: Have four (or more) antennas at known relative positions listen for the signal and measure the DIFFERENCE in the arrival time. (You can also measure the PHASE of the signal to determine the "difference in arrival time" to as much less than a cycle of the signal as you equipment can measure the phase.)
The surface of constant path difference (result of measuring with two antennas) gives you a hyperbolid. Add a third antenna and you get the intersection of two hyperbolids - a curved line. (Don't recall the family of curves at the moment.) Add the fourth and you're down to two points in space.
You can also do this with four passive devices measuring the time between a cell tower's "ping" and the phone's reply, though the computation is a bit more involved.
Problem is that this is the behavior in free space. Add anything that bounces the signal about or shields the direct path and you're fouled up. And the phones are under tons of material, much of which reflects microwaves.
Forget about measuring phase to locate down to inches - you'll have to depend on the arrival time of the start of the signal, before the additional signals that took a different route arrive. Still good for feet or so. But if you're lucky what you'll find is the hole the signal is coming out of - and if you're not you'll get a bogus location in the vicinity of such a hole or perhaps the vicinity of the singal itself, due to signals taking different bank-shots to different antennas.
Still, I expect it would point you in the right direction and usually send you to the right room-sized volume. And as you dig out more obscuring stuff the quality of the location would progressively improve. That's good - as you get closer you need a better idea where you're goiong, to keep from crushing the person you're after.
Also: There's no reason why you couldn't bring test equipment that, once it got a good path to the phone could CALL it, so (if the person was alive and awake) you could talk to them. (Though it might be good to use the call mostly to tell them to stay off the phone but leave it turned on, to conserve the battery.)
Which brings up one last downside: Some people may have either used up their batteries trying to call out while there was no working base station in reacy, or turned off the phone to conserve power for later.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Brings to mind the argument I've been having with my wife. On the day of the attack, some FAA spokesman was on the air proclaiming how well trained the terrorist must have been due to the difficulty of flying such a large plane. My immediate response was, "Bullshit, they just want to inflate the enemy so that they don't look so pathetically insecure." Think about it. If anyone could pull this off this means that we don't have a chance in hell of covering our asses.
Well, guess what. I've been hearing people who actually fly plane saying how easy this would be. Take off and landing would be hard without the proper training and experience, but aiming at a spot and flying the plane into it would be simple.
The government types want you to think they can protect you completely, and they want you to hand over all your liberties as payment. The fact is they can't protect you from BinLaden or McFey (don't know the correct spelling of his name). If someone wants to blow something up, they WILL find a way, EVEN in a police state.
If you don't believe that, then explain how Allies guerilla operations can take out Axis infrastructure (even if only a small amount) during WWII when Germany was a POLICE STATE!!
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba