Slashdot Mirror
Tracking People Via Cell Phone
An anonymous reader writes "According to the articleat the Guardian the UK Government have been working on a project to use the widely available mobile phone masts as a form of localised radar to track both people and vehicles without their knowledge.
Supposedly there is even work on the way to give this project the ability to see through walls!
Maybe Philip K. Dick was right to be paranoid about governments."
The UK has discovered that radio waves can go through walls now? You mean I no longer have to go outside to talk on the cellphone? Will wonders never cease.
A. Rightmann
When the cat can walk through walls, that's when I'll get nervous.
A much more valid reason to avoid cellphones is radiation. If you remember your physics, H=qrP/3pi which indicates that the dosage recieved is proportional to the distance. Since you put your cellphone by your head (and since they contain substantial amounts of power, to reach the faraway cell towers) your brain is going to get quite a zap. Use with care, or with tongs.
Next they'll realize that they can track nerds via /. posts.
There have been reports (after the bank massacre in Nebraska) of cars being tracked by the GPS system, which makes no sense- unless the reporters confused the LoJack with the GPS.
Anyway, many people (from Pablo Escobar to Chechen rebels) have already found out the hard way that it is possible to triangulate on cell-phones.
Oh, and if you get a free cell phone from a relative, and then the Mossad calls you? Hang up quick!
I tend to favor Orwellian paranoia myself...
TODO: Something witty here...
Governments across the world are working on secret plans to watch you through your TV set and bug all your private conversations via the fillings in your teeth.
Because they really, really want to know what inane bullshit you're talking about at any given moment. Sure. Right.
Take a look at here .
There you can give a permission to your friends with Sonera cellphone accounts to locate you.
I need to construct a faraday cage where no radio signals can enter or exit?
Ale is not meant to be that cold. The only reason USians like it that way is that it tastes so horrible that you need to numb the taste buds.
The tin-foil hat I wear to keep the government out of my head can help them find my phone.
So how does this interfere with UK's wiretapping laws (if any apply)? I am not up to policies for police across the pond.
Zech Harvey, MCSE, MCDBA, CCNA
As far as I am concerned, not having a cell phone is a status symbol...
love is just extroverted narcissism
...get over it!
Rather what it does is to transform all of the telephone masts into "radar platforms". So, it cannot identify you, but it can tell you that there is something in a particular location....
GSM allows for some (limited) form of triangulation of a call.
This is not very easy to do, but, if I remember well, a couple of years ago, the French emergency services were able to track down a small group of people, who were blocked in the mountains with nothing but a cell phone to call for help.
Apparently, it took a couple of phone calls (not easy to to as the weather was bad and the phone battery almost dead) to be able to triangulate their exact position, but it worked -- they were rescued after about 4 days and four nights lost out there in the woods. I am sure other European countries have seen the same thing happen.
Bottom line? Don't use a GSM cell phone if you are paranoid... and don't forget your nice and shiny tinfoil hat to protect your brain from all the microwaves... =)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
They are already doing this at Finland, though police has limited access to such information and they need court order to get it.
-- Reality checks don't bounce.
Far to much power is being consolidated in far to few people.
Give everyone this tech and everyone would spy on each other for a year or two, then it would be common and boring. (except in small towns, where people would like to know the last time the neigbors wiped their ass.)
If you had read the article, you would realize that they are trying to read the reflected cell tower radio waves and make a radar picture out of it. They already know they reflect, the rest is just engineering.
A. Rightmann
Yes, this is "an invasion of privacy", but what is the big deal? Does eeryone think that they are so important that the government wants to spy on them? Gimme a break!
... so I don't mind this. If anything, this is a tool that could help protect me and the other millions of innocent people from those people that do have something to hide ...
... * please don't flame me too harshly *
I don't have anything to hide
Some food for thought
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Screw that! I want them to use cell phone towers to detect Slashdot dupe posts - again and again and again... BTW, have we had any triple posts yet or are we still waiting for that treat?
Money for nothing, pix for free
This isn't just monitoring which cell a phone user is in, but actually using the base station masts as radar to detect moving objects (e.g. people and cars) anywhere within the field - which means basically making the entire UK transparent, even if you're not carrying a cellphone! It's perfectly serious, here's a link to the company developing it - first mentioned in Jane's Defence Weekly in 2000, but it's only recently got government funding.
I would even argue that the UK gov't is well within it's rights to track UK citizens like this. After all, the gov't pays for their health care for free, right? So they should be keeping tabs on everyone to make sure they don't get hit by a bus or anything that will cause a big expense for taxpayers. The one that pays for the maintenance fees/doctor appointments should be the one in charge of what kind of dangerous activities engaged in, eh wot wot?
Its easy to avoid.. just stand very, very still.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Link to article disussing how this application of cell towers can be used. http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2001/e20010 619stealths.htm
You should read the article before commenting.
This new system uses the radio waves from cell stations as a form of radar, tracking moving objects, ALL MOVING OBJECTS, not just phones.
Nope this is different - read the article. It is not about tracking phones (which they already do) it's about tracking objects using the phone signals.
It's basically radar but using cellphone transmissions as the source signal, so you don't need to put up radar transmitters everywhere because the telcos have done it for you.
...if you're a government.
I mean, why waste time trying to get skin implants into your population (or some other sci-fi of the week device) when you can simply use something ubiquitous as the cell phone to track the general population!
We all know there are ways around it. How? Why, simply buy a pre-paid phone with cash, and turn the thing off when not in use.
You didn't read the article, did you? They aren't tracking the cell phones (that would be nothing new), they're tracking every moving person and vehicle within range of a cell phone tower by using the things like radar, reading the reflections of the signals being sent out of the tower.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
who will be the first slashbot to quote 1984?
en tea
Okay, I might be violating some law... but there is a way to stop them from using this technique. I'm going to the patent office, but I thought I would give you a heads-up... I call my invention the "off button".
On a related story, they can also track you when you are using a regular non-cellular telephone.
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
ther resources to track random people.
they will just use it as a servalence mechanism, hence, they will get a warent. this will also allow them to get the cell phone records on a person in order to coroberate an alibie of a suspect.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
kibbles and grits
Anyone put up a web page yet that allows entry of the network and cell phone number and returns GPS coordinates? That would push the envelope and make headlines.
It seems that half of the comments are from people who has not read the article!
The article talks of a radar system based on the reflected waves from mobile phones. I have a number of problems with this:
* The problem is huge, as each signal emitter is mobile, and thus the signal processing needed to filter out the source of each signal-bounce must be huge.
* As the number of signal emitters are variable in the vicinity of each reciever, this make the signal processing even more complex.
* They claim to being able to put all this in a laptop sized device.
This would not be so controversial if it was a simple cell phone tracing system, as they allready exist. In Sweden, one of the major competators even offer a 'locate' service, allowing other users to locate a phone. This service can be turned on and off from the located phone by sending SMSs. Even when turned off, the phone can still be located, all you block is the ability to get a position on another phone. This can, and has been used by the police to, for example, prove that a certain person has been at a certain location at a certain time.
I had the privilage of working for a mobile company in Ireland, and one day I was be-bopping around the building and accidently came across a room that I hadn't noticed before. I looked in and saw a giant metal cage and in the cage was a comuputer console and a couple of large servers. I asked the network guy later what it was and he told me it was for the Garda (Police in the Republic of Ireland) to be able to track people. Basically, under court order, they could track down anyone. The understanding of the technology has been around for a long time. Simple triangulation of transmission and there you go, got them. The problem is actually getting access to the information.
I found out later I wasn't supposed to know about that and that there were essentially Garda assigned to that room on a 24 hour basis to impliment any court ordered tracking.
Obviously you aren't made aware of these when signing your monthly agreement, are you?
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Read the article. Holy crap!
This is not tracking where your phone is. That's old hat.
This is using the cellphone signal radiation as an imaging system, like radar or x-rays. Except always on, everywhere. Anyone who walks or drives within range would be imaged.
Sure it would be low res and only show large and/or moving objects like people and cars but It's quite the panopticon. i.e. everyting everwhere is seen.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Maybe Philip K. Dick was right about more then that.
Why do you think you are not a robot?
Manchester United is an Association Football team. Not a Rugby team.
*meep*
You didn't read the other 2 comments did you? You're the third person to say that.
But what's your point? If my mobile is turned off, then there are no radio emissions. There is nothing to bounce off me, and therefore nothing to detect.
This is great to check if somebody is moving into an otherwise empty area on your airbase or powerplant. For tracking individuals in the city this is a non-starter.
Save the paranoia for cell-phone tracking. I know first hand what we can do with that tech.
TCAP-Abort
Manchester United is a football team, mate.
From the article:
"Signals bounced back by immobile objects, such as walls or trees, are filtered out by the receiver. This allows anything moving, such as cars or people, to be tracked." (italics mine)
This is much, much scarier than tracking cellphone users (since tracking can easily be avoided by NOT CARRYING ONE). Anything that moves can be watched by Them--you, your car, your cat. And it's only a matter of time before they find some way to positively identify each blob of motion their little devices detect.
Of course, the good news is that the system filters out immobile objects. So, most of us /. nerds sitting here at our computers all day will be well-nigh invisible :)
insert IANAx where x equals the first letter of the science I would need to study in order to get this right,
but...
It is actually my understanding that the user of the phone, is not being tracked,
but that they are actually using the signal sent out by any number of phone(s) as a sort of "X-ray" type thing
where the objects in-between any given cell phone and the reciever device
stop the signal, creating a shadow that the reciever picks up,
Thus creating the image
That is where the reference to Radar comes into play, by not actually locating the person by the origin of the signal, but by the objects in the way of the signal on its way to the reciever
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking - H.L. Mencken
you can be triangulated on. You don't have to be talking. Since your cell phone has to announce it's availability to local cells so that it can receive incoming calls, you can be found. Not as invasive as the GPS phones or this cell phone radar, but still not comfort inducing. So if you're concerned (and you know who you are), shut off that phone.
We need to be paranoid about our governments? Why, yes, of course they can do nasty things to us. Way nastier than tracking criminals, I'd say. My guess, though, is that most /. readers live in countries where the people have at least some power over their government. So if you don't like a policy, try to not make them do it.
---
Odzacar cisti odzak
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Why is it that when people benefit from a technology, they embrace it and can't love it enough -- then when a government decides to use that technology that they've embraced, but for "evil" purposes (like monitoring traffic, public safety), they're outraged that their actions have measurable consequences?
If you don't like it, turn off your cell phone. Send messages by pigeon, use a cup and string to talk to your friends, be a hermit.
The smart person is the one who manages his/her technology, not the one who gets all bent out of shape and protests whenever a new use if found by someone more clever...
Read the article. This is not tracking people who have cellphones, this is tracking anyone who walks past the cell mast.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
They're talking about using the towers as a radar type system - this is a different story to the fact that they can track your movements by plotting which towers you've been connecting through lately...
Regards,
Denny
Police State UK - news and
Photons, you dolt.
Would be a way to sneak in speeding tickets with no extra roadside equipment except a camera to identify the speeder.
A related use would be to tell cops where "speeding hot spots" are, so they can go hide there.
Really, this technology doesn't scare me very much. It's nothing they couldn't already do. Even the Libertarian in me has a hard time getting too riled up over this. There are bigger battles to fight than this.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
1.) rob london bank
2.) toss cell phone contained in ziplock bag into thames
3.) profit
but...
In order for that to work, no one, anywhere, would be able to have a cell phone
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking - H.L. Mencken
Good one!
Provide some science like PhysicsGenius did and maybe we'll believe you. But I personally have read many peer-reviewed studies indicated that cellphones are the next thalidomide.
This does not rely on criminals carrying a mobile phone. It has little to do with tracking mobile phones. It uses the mobile phone network, that sends radio waves all over the place (well.. not 100% coverage.. but close) and by some clever technology these radio waves can be used as a radar system. Again, not to track phones, but as a normal radar syste, - to track moving objects. The article explains how they can monitor the surroundings of a nuclear power plant.. to see if anyone/anything is moving towards it... and then be able to target that location with a moving cctv camera.. rather than needing cameras pointing everywhere. Simply.. this is a radar system covering the whole UK - and they are working on getting it tracking movement inside buildings. So when a crime has been commited, they won't need a helicopter and police cars to track the criminals fleeing. Simply use the radar system, follow them to their secret base, and bingo. Note to self: locate secret base where I cannot get a mobile phone signal
Yeah, or even Thomas Jefferson. Or the ancient Greeks.
-Peter
So now we need legislation to make sure everyone
a) Has a mobile phone
b) Cannot turn it off
c) Leave it at home
Wow, we'll catch all those crooks now...
Ah, I see. So while it may not pinpoint a person, it could tell authorities that a particular call was relayed thru a particular mast, thus the odds are that the person they want to catch is in a certain radius??
:)
(I read the article, but somehow didn't extract this til I read your post.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I think they're using the towers, not the handsets, but I could be wrong. Either way, just because your phone is off doesn't mean the guy next to you switched his off too...
Regards,
Denny
Police State UK - news and
Yeah, I know. I was just weaseling out of it. Although I get the feeling that actually turning a phone on and off a lot might cause a few problems. Suddenly the whole landscape starts changing.
well they didn't need the voice recognition software after all. charlie is in big trouble now.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
"I can triangulate the position from the signal of the cell phone"
Then his wife popped up in the window, and she was like, you nerdy bastard how did you do that?!
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Roke Manor is the former research centre from Plessey and specialised in radar and communications.
Even the slashdot article has the facts right this time, there's no excuse for half the comments in this discussion getting it wrong! :)
Regards,
Denny
Police State UK - news and
I think you mean soccer, 'mate'.
In the past, all or most of technology-related privacy concerns have differed from this one in a single simple aspect: you basically had to be an active user of whatever technology was exploiting your privacy to be vulnerable to it. Therefore in order for your credit card to be stolen online, it needed to, at some point be transmitted via an online purchase or transaction. More to the point, you actually had to OWN a credit card. A person with all his wealth in gold buried in his back yard had nothing to fear from hackers and the Y2K bug.
Similarly, spam, web tracking, email monitoring, phone tapping, phone-based GPS geo-location; all of these invasions could, by eschewing the technologies involved and choosing to live a simpler, less connected life, be avoided. The sacrifice involved was significant, but not unmanagable.
If technologies like these become acceptable forms of populace control, this axiom of "it only affects you if you use it" will no longer apply. A technophobe with no phone line and no electricity living in a cold-water flat in London will still be vulnerable to electronic espionage. The current range of this technology is anywhere cellular service is available. Considering I was able to make a call this summer from the peak of a 5000 meter isolated mountain top in the remote Italian alps, I find this idea truly terrifying.
The UK has, in recent years, been a bellweather for survaillance practices worldwide. As an American citizen beginning to see the sort of widespread video survaillance now common to those living in England, I make a simple plea to any UK citizens reading: Do anything within your power to stop this. Write letters, mail threatening powders, strip in front of parliment. (Note: don't mail powder. thats a bad idea) Anything to keep this idea from gaining a foothold. I ask this of you so that you aren't subjected to it, but also so that it doesn't eventually bleed into my country.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
the new thing is the radar functionality. cell phone triangulation is nothing new -- governments have been able to do that for a long time. that's how they killed pablo escobar. one minute, he was ordering chinese food, the next....
....EOF
Good thing the UK still believe's in 007 style "Top Secret"...
It dosn't.
Nobody is evesdroping on your phone call, just ""pinging"" your phone. I suspect the law is similar in most countries
Anyway, bacofoil is the tin foil of choice for avoiding government intervention :-)
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Point is that even if your mobile is off, if you _could_ get a signal then there is a tower transmitting at you. Those transmissions bounce off you whether you have a phone or not.
Using handset signals for this is probably a non starter as you don't know the handset position accurately (to calculate your reflections) and the signal strength is much lower.
Radar is not reflected by human tissue (or animal tissue). That is very obvious in a microwave oven; if tissue would reflect radar, it would never heat up.
Except in rare circumstances (with degenerate solutions), you need to be within range of at least three receiver stations for any attempt at triangulation. This is due to the need to determine the (x, y, t) source of the cell phone signal. For simplicity, one can assume the signal originates from some univeral ground level assigned to each receiver station. In practice, this is often not a safe assumption.
Assuming you are in an area where you are visible to at least three receiver stations, there is an additional problem with multipath. Signals may reflect off of objects, increasing the distance (and thus time) to the receiver station. Due to this, estimations with *five* receiver stations (and non-trivial estimation theory) can still be grossly inaccurate.
-- jetlag --
Maybe Philip K. Dick was right to be paranoid about governments.
First of all, I challenge the notion that Philip K. Dick was 'paranoid'. I know I'm straying a bit off topic here, but I think this characterization is really unsophisticated and does not do Dick's legacy any justice. PKD used all sorts of mechanisms to portray life as a sequences of overlapping and (occassionally) paradoxical realities. In this sense, Dick was quite non-Hegelian in his philisophical outlook -- a trait that separates him from most 'paranoids'.
In any event, I can think of about ten billion better examples of people that *are* actually 'paranoid' about governments.
Slashdot will post a story about eBay or Microsoft today!
Hi,
here in germany I'm customer of a company called o2. The kind of service I use is called genion. One feature offered from their homepage is called track handy. Well right now they miss my position about 100 meter, and I'll get an sms, that i've requested the tracking service. But I guess secret monitoring is only a small step away. And it doesn't seem to be the technology what's the obstacle...
People seem to be imagining this technology giving you decent-quality moving pics of people moving around. Impossible (IMNSHO) for the following simple but adequate reasons:
1) Phone masts are designed for 1.8GHz tops. At that freq, lambda is about 17cm. Therefore that's about your spatial resolution. Also, this may not apply in all directions. You might, in fact probably will, be worse off in some axes. In fact, I'm not sure you'll get more than a 2-D map out of it, since cellphone masts are laid out in a 2-D pattern, and there is no "grid" in the third dimension (height above ground, altitude).
2) So, it's impossible to identify an individual with that poor resolution
3) And, you can;t even track one moving individual reliably. Someone would (IMNSHO) only have to approach someone, embrace them, spin around a bit, and alk off again, and then I suspect the "viewer" wouldn't be able to tell which individual was which. Do that a few times with a few people, and the number of possible people the "baddie" could be goes up rapidly!
4) All the above assumes the system works really well even at that poor resolution (17cm). What's the temporal resolution, or "frame rate" of the system? Pretty crap, I bet!
5) So quit worrying. There's no way that this technology can be as sexy as it sounds just using existing cellphone masts.
Martin "Fleetie"
"Absorbing your worst..."
I can inderstand the police wanting to follow criminals to their secret base, but bingo? do they expect them to spend their loot there or something?
From my understanding of the article, the observer makes use of the signals broadcast from a local cell tower, presumably equipped with their own receiver, to pick up the reflections from moving objects in the vicinity.
In WW2 both sides used strips of aluminium foil (codenamed "Window" by the UK) of the correct length (relative to wavelength) to jam the opposition's radar. If you were so worried, what would stop you from lining the insides of your house etc strips of the appropriate length? Would there be a problem with tuning it to cell frequencies?
I'm just curious to understand the issues involved.
I am important enough that I don't need cell phone
so people can track me and, more importantly,
bother me.
Be Patriotic: Smoke Amerikan Grown Ganja!!
Maybe Philip K. Dick was right to be paranoid about governments.
Was this an attempt to sound clever? If it was, it failed spectacularly, for reasons too numerous to be worthy of explanation.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
To be very specific, it makes every mast into a Bistatic radar emitter. The tower emits the pulse thanks to GSM older design, and one or more reciever arrayed around receive the original signal and the bounces. So rather then allocate bandwidth, setup seperate emitters, and field it all over they are killing two bird with an existing stone.
This will see through some things, but not the way you think of it normally. You will get information indicating a "Large signal bounce", not the housewife at home. Although the low cost security, vehicle tracking, suspect finding (guns have a great cross section at these frequencies) applications are enormous.
Now the question is if they can make it work with CDMA. Possible, but probably not practical.
And we've had surveillance satellites that can see the headlines of the newspaper you're reading in the park since the '80s.
So why panic now?
It's not the information that's collected that's scary - it's how it's used.
If they used it to track the movements of organized crime, and it helped build cases, go for it.
If they used it to track every Brit's trip to the "loo", and sold the information to Cottonelle to increase their TP market-share, that's not so good.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This really isn't that new of a technology. I know it has been proposed here in the US on some highways to use information like the number of cellphones in an area, the information could be used to track things like traffic congestion, and then monitoring centers could direct highway patrol to problem areas. It might also help alert highway patrol of accidents, etc. The idea is that they monitor the flow and can see the number of cellphones in an area. The technology of course makes sense because so many people have cellphones and with digital cellphone technology your phone maintains a constant, or almost constant connection to the cellphone tower to my understanding, whether you are making a phone call or not. I know that if you look at this http://money.tbo.com/money/MGAKCWDF15D.html that you can see where this sort of technology has already been used, but not applying to cellular phones. The idea is essentially the same however. I believe that the cellphone traffic technology stuff I'm talking about was planned for testing somewhere south of D.C. on the beltway or something. It was either Virginia or Maryland where I saw something about it though. Don't know if it ever got implemented.
:)
Some people may also know that reccent government mandates in the US have required cellphone companies and manufacturers to be able to locate a cellphone call to a more precise geographical area. I believe that the goal is something like 25 feet or so. I think the requirement is 300 feet right now. Not sure on this though. The reason stated was of course for 911 calls, however other uses could be conceived.
People can turn their cellphones off, however there are some theories that the phone may still give off some signals (so just remove the battery). Of course new legislation will require you not to remove the battery and the phone will not be able to be opened, etc or else you'll be brought to court under DMCA type laws! heheh Maybe going into areas of 'No Service' will be forbidden too
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Yeah, or even Thomas Jefferson. Or the ancient Greeks.
Agreed. Not only is he a relatively obscure (for the masses, that is) dead sci-fi author, he was also not very interested in politics, his books do mostly deal with metaphysical issues rather than the more "mundane" paranoia considered here, and the greeks predated him by a couple of thousand years.
The writeups on this place are sometimes so silly as to defy reason.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
o2 network (UK based) offers something like this, you can have a option where it can locate you, through the signal, to help find local restaurants, and top-up shops.
i don't see this being too different to triangulation, which is around at the momment.
Of course it is different in form, working on a different principle, but the results remain the same.
And 'see through walls'? How hard can this be to implement? Thermal Imaging and anything else that is not dependant on line-of-sight functions can do this already.
Might as well use all that radiation we are constantly bathed in for something useful... I wonder how long before they can turn a cell tower into a sort of directed engergy weapon. Think about it, get 2 or 6 phone towers and electronically steer them towards a point on earth, possibly using this "CellDar" as a targetting system. Time the intersecting beams for the various towers to reach the target exactly in-phase, causing constructive interference at the target's brain, say. The 500,000 watts or so of RF/microwave radiation placed in a few square inches of brain tissue would cause immediate nervous system disruption and perhaps instant death.
The former Soviets actually did a lot of research into directed energy and such weapons. They also developed a lot of interesting research on other uses for concentrated RF--it seems as though the human nervous system operates on a kind of clock (it isn't just randomly firing), and certain frequencies of directed energy can disrupt and change brain patterns, even influence behavior. Of course, all of their experiments involved very powerful RF at very close range to the emitter under lab conditions.... Only with many emitters, computer-controlled, with some type of targeting system, could make this thing work at a longer range.
Of course, it isn't published--so it doesn't exist--and I'm going to get flamed off slashdot and told to go put on my tinfoil hat. What would you do if you had a mind control system? Tell the world. I guess so...
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I saw a police car the other day where the words 'protect and serve' had been vandalized so they said 'to collect and serve'...
Hear my prayer. Smite down the hordes that posteth about triangulation and about GPRS, for they have not read the linked-to article. Curse them with boils and locusts and bad, bad karma, and banisheth also those that moderate them up, for they do spill their karma upon the stony ground. As in Kuro5hin, so shall it be on Slashdot, for ever and ever, amen.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It's not like they can identify the objects seen by this system. Unless given prior knowledge or a starting point (Person X was here at time Y), they're just unidentified reflections.
As it is, if they really want to track someone and obtain the same information this system could provide, it's a simple matter of sending up an AWACS plane. (Note: The comments in the article about a fixed system are WRONG. Powerful radars can be and have been put into airplanes) Yes, the new system is more convenient, but doesn't really provide THAT much information that could be used to invade privacy. Hell, carry around a mylar birthday balloon or two and all of a sudden you're an 18-wheeler as far as they're concerned. (I remember a few Slashdot articles ago there were links to the guy who tied 20-30 balloons to an armchair and took off - A few years later another guy repeated the incident and wrapped his tether lines in aluminum foil. He appeared to nearby radar systems to be as large as 4 stacked 747s. He would've looked even bigged if he'd used conductive balloons - One weather balloon can appear as large as a supertanker on radar if it's covered in a conductive material.)
As someone else pointed out, tracking of actual phones (Which can be linked to someone's identity) is "old hat". Already pretty good accuracy is possible (especially on CDMA networks due to properties of CDMA signals that make them very good for range estimation - CDMA signals and GPS "Gold codes" are VERY close relatives of each other.), and the next generation of phones (Some are already out) are E-911 capable, which adds GPS capability to the phone that is used for 911 calls.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Here are some links I found: DARPA research, Canadian project (they're pretty tight -lipped about this), and German work is ongoing too.
It seems to have been used in astonomy for counting meteors & observing auroras.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
I think I need to get some lead walls now. Would that do the trick?
Well, "Radio Free Albemuth" is chocka with mundane government paranoia, as was the later part of Dick's life, when he was writing unsolicited letters to the FBI informing on his friends for being subversives.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Ok.. I'll let you spell "colour" the way you want to in peace, if you'll let me call it football. Ok?
That is what he meant by that situation being rectified.
The parent to you was very cynical, but I don't know that I would say funny. There needs to be a different mod category, cynicsm or something.
Mr. Stones, I now know what tasty lunchtime treat I'm going to order! My hat's off to your excellent first post.
The key words are *mobile phone masts*. While the article says authorities are only using the signals from the masts, you've got to filter out the signals from the mobile phones as well. So I'd say the original comment is correct.
Lockheed Martin's "Silent Sentry" system has been trackin airplanes this way for several years, but instead of using relatively weak and short-range cellphone signals, they use the immensely stronger broadcast television and radio signals. A simple demonstration of this technology can be done with any old TV attached to an antenna -- when an airplane flies over, you often get a distortion or echoes in the TV image. As you might imagine, if you explicitly start looking for these distortions, you can detect and track the airplanes remarkably well.
Lockheed's first installation had used regular Radio-Shack TV antennas, but they were replaced pretty quickly by simple T-shaped antennas, along the wall of their building near Baltimore-Washington International airport. They claimed to be able to track targets more than 100 miles away. One spectacular advantage of this kind of 'radar' is that it has no emissions of its own, so the pilots have no inkling that their plane is being tracked. Apparently these systems required substantial computing horsepower, but of course the price of that has plummeted recently. I'm sure that one could build one of these systems now for a shockingly small amount of money.
Given the work that has been done using the long-wavelength TV signals, I'm sure that it will not be long at all before the equivalent cell tower based system can be deployed. It will be interesting to see what it is used for. Theoretically, these systems could have tremendous positive value; for example, things like smart cruise-control that knows where all the cars around you might be. Still, at least in the beginning, you can be sure that it will be exploited by the military and police forces first.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
One technique used in radar today is "pulse compression", that of modulating a radar pulse with a sequence that produces a large spike when correlated with itself. The most common such codes for actual pulses are called Barker codes, the longest of which is 13 bits. So, for example, with a 13-bit Barker code, a 13 microsecond "pulse" at 1 megawatt can produce nearly the same resolution and signal/noise performance as a 1 microsecond actual pulse at 13 megawatts.
There are also cyclic orthogonal codes that allow for even larger code lengths, turning a modulated CW signal into a virtual "pulsed" signal. Radio astronomers at Arecibo used this technique for radar imaging of Venus. The transmitter transmitted a megawatt or so CW, modulated with a sequence that was something on the order of 8000 bits long. The cyclic codes aren't as orthogonal to themselves as the Barker codes, but I believe they got an effective gain of around 5000-6000, giving an effective 5-6 gigawatt pulsed transmitter.
Note that CDMA happens to rely on orthogonal codes...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Wrong.
I was a Ground Surveillance Systems Operator in the United States Army. Your right the resolution on the radar will not allow you to actually "see" the person, but It turns out you can "hear" the reflected doppler shift and a trained ear can descriminate between A vehicle, pedestrian or even two pedestrians if they have varying amounts of metal on them or have different walking rhythms. So If I had the opportunity to listen to a target walking, for about a minute, then the target embracing someone and walking off would do no good unless they had the same rhythm and the same equipment/belts/zippers and arm swing. I would be able to continue to track them. Of course if the target walked up to someone, embraced them and both targets then started skipping or prancing off in other directions, I would lose them, Or rather I would track both, so really this will only obfuscate you if you can walk up embrace, prance, and repeat. But doing this might draw attention to yourself.
wow. about three people here actually read the article and understood it.
80% of slashdot readers believe this to be about triangulation of cellphone signals.
news for nerds - stuff that you think you know everything about from the headline, so reading the article doesn't matter.
Can you see me now?
Good!
"Maybe Philip K. Dick was right to be paranoid about governments." Maybe??
Since cops also spend a good amount of time catching people getting a bit of nookie, couldn't it be "to collect and perv"?
That's why I said "mostly" - I know some of his books deal with the regular tin-foil hat paranoia the submitter was referring to.
Remember also that Dick was insane during the last years of his life, probably schizophrenic. He was not only stalked by the FBI, but by aliens, God, and pretty much everything else as well.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
"'Da tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. Come with me if you want to live."
</accent=>
(Yes, I am aware that this quote is not from the cited document.)
-Peter
I know for a fact that both Finland where I live, and New Zealand where I was involved (can't disclose more, sorry) very directly with Location Based Services, have 'em since 3 years. So, this is not news at all. Maybe the folks in UK think it is, though ;o)
The technology is actually really easy to implement, because the Visitor Location Register (part of the mobile switching center) already sends the (somewhat cryptic) location of the cell where you are, but previously people didn't think it would be useful. There's a bit more to it, to determine the position more precisely, but basically, that's it.
Sigged!
"Maybe Philip K. Dick was right to be paranoid about governments"
Maybe he should stop using so much coke.
Oh wait. That's Andy Dick.
But this is new. This can detect people who don't have cell phones. If that doesn't make sense to you, read the article again. Or just read it for the first time.
Informative? nope, quite the reverse.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
afaik, this has already been used for police investigatios etc in europe for a long time. each time a gsm moves into the area of a certain mast, it registers with the mast. this, in connection with triangulation makes it possible to pinpoint locations. the method is well known, but might be new to u.s. citizens, as mobile telephony in the u.s. technologically lies behind european standards. pin-pointing gsm in the u.s. is probably harder, as the distances from mast to mast are larger, though one might be able to narrow down the results using signal strenght during a phone call as an additional variable. just a thought though...
Well the government already knows where you are anyway if you have your phone on - obviously the phone has to logon to a cell and that connects it with your phone number (and potentially your name and address if your on a rental/contract). The government could be looking at this already without anyone's knowledge, certainly a technician or programmer for the phone company can, and probably they do, without anyone's knowledge. So already you can be tracked to with-in a cell, which could be quite close especially in a city.
When you physically move into another cell, the network must know witch transmitter to take over (this might only happen if your actually in a call im not sure) but that effectively means they are tracking signal strength of the surrounding transmitters so you could take a guess or use triangulation/geometry to figure out a more precise position - depending if a call is actually being made - this would be harder to pull off if you wanted to keep it secret (or avoid loosing your job) but its still possible.
Everyone knows that phones with GPS receivers will also take commands from the phone company/3rd party. At any time the phone is on, they'll be able to ask it for its position without the user even knowing. You never know, the phone could even _pretend_ to be turned off, yet still be giving out its position. You'd have to take out the battery or wrap it in foil.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
You ever tried to get a phone which has decent reception once you're away from the big cities? All that 'we have 95% coverage' advertising refers to the population, not geographical spread... all gets a bit flaky once you get into the hills over 500 metres high! (mind you persuading despatch companies to deliver computers to the Islands is pretty hard as well, anything after Glasgow is as good as Greenland for them....)
Um no, they'd have to not go anywhere where there is cellphone coverage. If you're not getting how radical this is, read the article.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
"I am so inconsequential, the government could care less about me" arguments work for a while. But read "The Trial" by Franz Kafka to see what a totalitarian state could do to you.
We was able to triangulate a suicidal PCS user at the MTA by following the signal strength between the three cell sectors he was in. Each time he traveled, the phone would have to tell each sector that it was entering its zone so the switch itself would 'hand-off' to the next cell sector. Thus leading us within a few hundred feet of his actual location. Granted, it took at least one set of eyes to watch the phone terminate to each new cell that he entered, but it was done. However timely.
In another case, the switch in another location was able to triangulate the location of a kidnapped victim that had been locked in the trunk of a car. The victim called the support line and they in turn called the local MTA and fed the information to the police. Who caught the perp on the highway!
This really isn't new, but now some govt Big Brothers seemed to have caught on to the tricks of triangulation.
I wonder how long it will be before they catch on that they can track stolen vehicles with the On Star system or some other GPS receiver...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear to be bright. Until you hear them speak.
You didn't read the other 2 comments did you? You're the third person to say that.
They weren't there when I replied, so I apparently took longer to say pretty much the same thing.
But what's your point? If my mobile is turned off, then there are no radio emissions. There is nothing to bounce off me, and therefore nothing to detect.
They don't require the phones to bounce signals off of you. The radio emissions are from the mast that gives you cell service, not from the cell phones themselves, as some of the replies to this post have already stated. The signals will bounce off of anything, not just phones, just like normal radar. Of course, getting them to map out areas behind walls will be the major breakthrough, if they actually manage it, and shouldn't be too hard given that you can use your cell indoors to begin with.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I just bought a Sanyo 4900 phone from sprint last week (really nice phone, although sprints SMS interface is total garbage) and it includes gps and the ability to turn it on and off. I'm not sure if the gps is in the phone or at the towers, but sprint promises location based services using it.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
According to the article at the Guardian the UK Government have been working
^^^^
HAS
Sheesh! Douchebagettes!
I know that people who subscribe to Locust in the uk, can find out how far away they are from their friends by means of gsm triangulation, amongst numerous other cool services.
No big deal. We'll just have a revolu....wait...scratch that. Already happened back in 1776. Dammit.
Surely all any wily criminal would do would be to leave his mobile phone at home? Surely any well-planned and well-financed terrorist operation would, knowing of this, just use those radios where what you say is encrypted and transmitted in a single, short, burst?
I'm not entirely sure how they work, though. I think you have to type your message in, although you should get some preset messages like "arrgh! the englander have shot me in the goolies!" and such.
Anyways, I don't have a mobile phone as I'm not entirely convinced having an emitter of EM radiation kept on standby near my testicles is an entirely good idea. Would keep them warm on those cold winter nights, though...
This has been concieved as a way of defeating stealth aircraft, and some observers believe this was how the Serbs shot down the F117 stealth fighter during the Kosovo campaign.
Stealth aircraft work mostly by reflecting radar away from the transmitter. But when the transmitter and receiver are not located at the same site, this can be defeated. Mobile phone networks fill the air with electromagnetic radiation, and if any one transmitter is located at a "lucky" spot, the receiver will be able to pick up the reflection from an aircraft. Since the open air usually doesn't reflect any radiation, an aircraft will stand out from the background.
Of course, to aquire range information, you'd have to trangulate with another receiver. And you can hardly use the doppler effect to get rid of ground clutter, since you'll be listening to a wide range of frequencies from a number of base stations. Also, it puts a new perspective on the question of targeting civilian infrastructure or not.
Score:-1, Wrong
Ah, I see. So while it may not pinpoint a person, it could tell authorities that a particular call was relayed thru a particular mast, thus the odds are that the person they want to catch is in a certain radius??
No, this has nothing to do with relaying calls through the antenna. If you're using a phone they can track you anyway, especially when you're using it. What this is talking about is using the mast that your calls are relayed through as a radar, which allows them to pick up ANYTHING (over a certain size I'm sure, based on the wavelength and other factors) moving in that particular area, regardless of whether or not people are actually using a phone. If you're in an area that has a phone signal, the masts that provide for that signal can also be used to watch the movement of all people and vehicles in the area, though it can't identify them individually (unless they have phones, then they could probably put the two pieces of information together, or incoordination with other surveillance systems, as mentioned in the article, such as training a video camera on a person or vehicle that was spotted moving in the area of that camera). The example used in the article is that of monitoring sensitive areas, such as nuclear plants, so they can see, thanks to the cell masts, that a person or vehicle has approached or crossed the perimeter around that plant, and they can notify the plant's security or use the plant's existing systems to further identify the breach.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
2) I don't believe that this system will be able to tell one person from another. So, for example, if you go somewhere where you can't be tracked (large building, subway, etc) the odds are that when you emerge you will just be an anonymous blob on the sceen (until you pass a security camera anyway).
3) Here's another idea. When walking about, keep passing very close to other people. It will make it more difficult for the operators to keep track of which blob is you.
4) Perhaps some sort of jammer could be devised. The total energy reflected by your body would be VERY small, so you would only need to radiate a microscopic amount of power. Probably less than would interfere with surrounding cellphones. Could a track on jam system be devised? Possibly, but I think that it would need changes to the central system.
Lockheed Martin's "Silent Sentry" system has been trackin airplanes this way for several years, but instead of using relatively weak and short-range cellphone signals, they use the immensely stronger broadcast television and radio signals. A simple demonstration of this technology can be done with any old TV attached to an antenna -- when an airplane flies over, you often get a distortion or echoes in the TV image. As you might imagine, if you explicitly start looking for these distortions, you can detect and track the airplanes remarkably well.
Lockheed's first installation had used regular Radio-Shack TV antennas, but they were replaced pretty quickly by simple T-shaped antennas, along the wall of their building near Baltimore-Washington International airport. They claimed to be able to track targets more than 100 miles away. One spectacular advantage of this kind of 'radar' is that it has no emissions of its own, so the pilots have no inkling that their plane is being tracked. Apparently these systems required substantial computing horsepower, but of course the price of that has plummeted recently. I'm sure that one could build one of these systems now for a shockingly small amount of money.
Given the work that has been done using the long-wavelength TV signals, I'm sure that it will not be long at all before the equivalent cell tower based system can be deployed. It will be interesting to see what it is used for. Theoretically, these systems could have tremendous positive value; for example, things like smart cruise-control that knows where all the cars around you might be. Still, at least in the beginning, you can be sure that it will be exploited by the military and police forces first.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Since the UK uses GSM, which is the only perfect phone system, there can be nothing wrong with this plan. Suck it, Americans, your crappy phone system won't support this for years. I bet you don't even have text messaging yet!
Because the "passive radar" that is based on the transmissions of cell phone towers unmasks stealth jets, the US is considering banning some cell phone technology!
NB: TIAJ
echo 656472616c73746f6e406d61632e636f6d0a|xxd -r -p
> This can, and has been used by the police to, for example, prove that a certain person has been at a certain location at a certain time.
No - all it does is "prove" that the phone has been there (prove in quotes since its not very accurate either).
So, if I'm a burglar and know my phone is under watch, I leave it with my gf at home, and then use it as an alibi? Or the other way around, you borrow it to a friend, who does the breakin, and you get convicted? I think not.
The only real scenario I can imagine is when a known burglar is monitored to be near some sensitive area, and they catch him/her red-handed. but that would be one helluva invasion of privacy.
Everyone knows wallhacks are for cheating loosers with no skillz :-)
This is basically the equivilent of the radar in Countstrike or Aliens, except unlike the CS radar, you will be able to see everyone. Add some signal emmision to the the radar that every 'soldier' carries and not only will he be able to see everyone around him, but also identify his buddies. If this tech becomes cheap enough that everyone gets it, this could revolutionize the way that urban warefare is played out. I'm not terribly concerned about the privacy issues, the government (UK and USA) does pretty much whatever it wants anyways, legal or not.
I have already pitched this idea to the South Carolina State Government to allow hurricane evacuation traffic management. During a recent evacuation, the Interstate was gridlocked for 24 hrs while a major highway 2 miles away was empty.
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
hear hear!
BTW, As has been pointed out, if you are carrying a cellphone, the watchers will get both where (and I presume a sillouete of you) and who. I find the idea a bit disturbing.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
You say potato...
I just got the new Audiovox CDM9155-GPX Phone from Verizon,
it has a single chip GPS reciever in it that can transmit your position when needed by the Cell Carrier
for future E-911 compliance (you can turn it off in the options).
I don't understand why they need to do anything but mandate new phones !
what I would really like to see is someone come up with a way to use the GPS unit in the phone with a Palm/PocketPC through the data connector
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
Government by its very nature (primarily because it is made up of people) is something to be applied only with suspicion, care and limits. Those that wish to wield it wildly are as the one who thinks it is cute to throw a large bottle of fire starter liquid into a camp fire regardless of those sitting around it. After the burns are treated and the bills paid that person is seen as a fool but not many ever stop to analyze why it was foolish. The fire was not to blame, they built it themselves. It was not the fire starter fluid either... no there are likely two factors here that are at fault. The person who threw it onto the fire is one, while the people who allowed this person access to the fire and the fluid are the other. If a dog attacks my children I will destroy it to save them. What if I had set my children on the other side of a fence within a yard of violent trained killing canines? Shouldn't I have my head examined? (or removed most likely to check for rabies)
The message is this... to those that practice vigilence I give you my thanks. To those that are only reactionaries that selectively lash out at only those functions of overstepping and bloated government that would hurt you (with no real care for others except as a source of soundbite and rhetoric) then I curse you and hope that I do not ever meet you in a dark alley. You are as much the cause of this as were the folks who turned in their friends and neighbors for 'acting' or 'looking' Jewish in Germany or who were secret capitalists or had western thought in Russia. You are filth. You are nothing but a disgusting, fecal eating animal that parrots rhetoric while you raise your fists and pickets for causes that are more cancerous than cure for the very issue you claim to champion.
If you do not like the ability of government doing this, then ask yourself how you have reduced government. Ask yourself if you acted as a wise human that looked past the rhetoric and sound bites of candidates and looked instead into their actual actions and past records to see what they trully cared for. Perhaps you just want to live a life of ease mindlessly grazing existence like the sheep you are... blatting for things that you don't understand and waiting for people to either save you from yourselves or tell you what to do and think. Hey! Maybe you can convince yourself that you are smart because you use fancy words and spew coming from the sewer of academia. Power to the people you shout yet it is the very same people you wish to enslave and control. Doublespeak was made by the people... never forget that or attempt to exhonerate yourselves from your role and guilt in that.
"NO! I CAN'T HEAR YOU! SPEAK UP! I'M IN A CINEMA"
Ah yes. The asshole's over there.
--glad you are noticing this. The globalist fascist goons use the ruse of "choice" with promoting two major political "wings" in nations like great britain and the us, etc. At the top levels they are all "goons", working together-more or less- to impose their solutions, which are basically a global two class master/serf society. Their poster child nation model is redchina. I term this technofuedalism. In the US here we have 99% of the population faked out to yank a D or R lever every election because to not do so is to "waste your vote". Well, to me the biggest waste is to vote for either the crips or the bloods criminal gang. These labels are not the isue, labor/conservative or democrat/republican if the RESULTS are near identical. If people would vote for the RESULTS they are looking for rather that remaining hung up on labels, perhaps all our nations might change for the better. My rule of thumb is, any party that has been in charge for a long time is now corrupt to the core, do not support them. Here in the US I am a an independent constitutionalist, so there's no way I would support the democratic or republican private corporations to continue their hijacking and excploitation of the US political/economic system. Not on any level, federal/state/local, I just do not vote for anyone with that D or r next to their name. They are in a nutshell, crooks first and foremost, or just faked out drones following inertia and brainwashing since birth, and the sooner the bulk of the grassroots supporters they have realise this, the sooner support for those two national organized criminal gangs will end. I make it a personal point to try and convince at least one person a week on this, just using normal logic and easily understood concepts. So far it's successful on the small scale I am working at-mostly-but it needs millions more people to do it as well. Good luck to you.
It is just my perception or do we seem to get a dozen new 'Invasion of Privacy' stories EVERY day? And then everybody gripes and debates about the whole immoral, disturbing consequences of this but nothing happens and it all goes ahead anyway. Does anybody really have any power to stand up against this stuff, and if they do then where are they?
Rake Free + Mac Poker: CardCrusade
And as such it has to spy on its own populace to detect foe from friends. Thus in a sense everybody was as much important as each other, because anybody might be a foe of the nation.
OTOH under democracy this is the different. And as such, every individual is unimportant, only big groups matters (where is the threshold is another question).
And as such, in the current crop of governement we have in the west, individual privacy is unimportant. The day it changes is the day we loose democracy to have only a simulacre of it.
Until then you can safely walk in the street with your mobile phone on. Threat to your privacy won't come from governement but from PRIVATE company which are always extremly interrested in every single secret and socio culturel habits we have to sell us more as individual.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
OK. So the SOB's are tracking your cell phone. Just turn it off@! So they're intercepting your email. Write a letter#! So they're investigating your mistress. Stop screwing around@! So they're about to bust you for the ton of hash you have in your boat. Don't smuggle dope*! So the SWAT team has surrounded your slum dwelling where you've stashed enough high explosives to blow up two city blocks. Eat shit and die terrorist*@#!
"Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that."
IIRC (can't find the exact article now), according to MilTech magazine, China has implemented, or is implementing, a similar scheme for military use. However, it is based on civilian TV broadcasts!
All these TV transmissions make up a radio pattern in the air, and by using arrays of passive receivers that analyze the radio waves at their particular spot, you can easily spot any large object moving through the air, interfering with the radio patterns. Thus, "stealth" aircraft will have a tough time as it is no longer necessary to return a radar signature to be spotted on radar -- you just have to be a large, blunt object in the enemy airspace.
So what enables this is basically lots and lots of processing power to continuously analyze the radio field patterns.
Why didn't they just ask that guy in Charle's Angels how he did it?
Idiots.
Kind of puts a weird twist on those "You are here" maps you see when your on vacation........
for 50c could they not just ring up and ask you ? :P
A little while back a couple of young girls went missing in the UK, and among many different attempts to locate them the police and phone companies tried using triangulation to locate on of the girls mobile phones.
It didn't work as the phone was probably turned off. Although they did later arrest a couple of people for the murder of the girls.
At one point in the investiagtion (before any one was arrested) the police sent a text message to the phone with details of a direct line to the local head of police. Of course the murderer didn't phone the head of police, but it seems they did turn the phone on to look at the text message. Apparently it took all of 9 seconds to locate the phone.
BBC News, has some info
I accept that using mobile phones to track your movements is a gross invasion of privacy, there are usefull benifits too.
what are other jurisdictions doing in this regard?
united states nuclear device terrorist bioweapon encryption cocaine korea syria iran iraq columbia cuba
http://www.echelonwatch.org/ , Makes you wonder "what's next?"
This type of system cannot give you very high resolution, its essentially extracting data from the convolved signal. Its been researched for quite a few years, this is just the press release stage from companies looking to up their share prices.
However, it IS a very good way of defeating stealth, and monitoring for cruise missiles. Its the reason not to throw all you money into a stealth based basket, since stealth has a limited lifespan and is eventually defeated by such approaches.
I suggest looking first here, and then here. It begins to appear more interesting once you piece things together...
Point taken, but they did seem to have a political motivation too. Why else were they critisising the proposed breakup of Railtrack (if I recall correctly).
BTW, I'm not a member of any political party, although I did vote Labour, but they seemed to be scoring political points at the time.
this is nothing different than the FBI getting legislation passed that requires all cell phones to be trackable for "911 services"
So you could:
A. Turn off your phone, rendering the "tracking" useless.
B. Not carry a cell phone if you're going to be trespassing on corporate or government property (or otherwise monitored space).
C. Throw your phone or launch it with a slingshot and send the coppers on a wild goosechase for "a man that can accelerate extrordinarily fast, fly, and then disappear [as the phone smashes into a hundred pieces]. Gentleman, we have found Superman!"
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
The UK Plan is probably lemonade made from the lemon discovery a year or two ago that strange fluctuations in the digital synchronization of the British cell transmission system, fluctuations that moved geographically at high speed and had a virtual source, were 'invisible' B2 stealth bombers. Digital cell tech used as passive radar, it turns out, completely foils the stealth technology implemented in each $10 Billion aircraft.
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
Maybe?!?! Phillip K. Dick WAS right. Welcome to the land of the enlightened.
Just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean you don't have enemies, or that they aren't after you...
This seems to be another application of the Roke Manor Research anti-stealth radar technology.
So you could:
A. Turn off your phone, rendering the "tracking" useless.
B. Not carry a cell phone if you're going to be trespassing on corporate or government property (or otherwise monitored space).
C. Throw your phone or launch it with a slingshot and send the coppers on a wild goosechase for "a man that can accelerate extrordinarily fast, fly, and then disappear [as the phone smashes into a hundred pieces]. Gentleman, we have found Superman!"
But regardless of which one you do, they still know that someone is there, and in the case of the slingshot they'll probably see you and the signal from the cell phone and figure out that you just used your cell phone as an expensive bit of litter. Again, the key is not the ability to track phones, because they've always had that, it's the ability to use the cell masts that allow people to use phones in a particular area (again, not the phones themselves) as a form of radar to track moving objects. They can't identify the objects unless they have a method for identification (such as a person's cell phone, or a video camera monitoring the area), but they at least have a good idea of whether or not a person or vehicle is there, and may be able to pick up more information (such as whether or not you're carrying any weapons) depending on how they set it up.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Mr D draws out a fat wad from the ATM to buy a mobile. Mr D buys anonymous mobile. Mr D puts in a call to his dealer for an eighth. All in all, about 10 minutes.
Mr D is photographed by the ATM, so "they" already have a face for the name. Mr D is seen on the shop's CCTV. Mr D makes a phone call, and is recorded on the town's CCTV, which is cross-referenced with the phone signal data: Newly activated phone, in the vicinity of camera X, bla blah...
You can work out the rest. It won't be long before a few high profile prosecutions of society's Monsters Of The Month are put down to the essential evedence gathered by the phone tracking, and the public will just accept it. Just look how they are 0wn1ng kids nowadays, taking their privacy before they learn it's principle, value and meaning. [yes, its a toker's site but the story is about tobacco]
Things are getting out of hand! That phrase is often an exaggeration, but look around you, not anymore. If you can't do anything about something, it's out of hand.
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
Paranoia, in some respects, I think, is a modern-day development of an ancient, archaic sense that animals still have - quarry type animals - that they're being watched... I say paranoia is an atavistic sense. It's a lingering sense, that we had very long ago, when we were - our ancestors were - very vulnerable to predators, and this sense tells them they're being watched. And they're being watched probably by something that's going to get them...
And often my characters have this feeling.
But what really I've done is, I have atavised their society. That although it's set in the future, in many ways they're living - there is a retrogressive quality in their lives, you know? They're living like our ancestors did. I mean, the hardware is in the future, the scenery's in the future, but the situations are really from the past.
--Philip K. Dick, in an interview, 1974.
(Quoted from the preface of a book of short PKD stories called 'Second Variety' - his 1950's stories, when it seems everyone in the USA was paranoid).
.. you dial 911, hangup and in 3 minutes you will have police, firetruck and an ambulance exactly on the spot where you dialed from.
It'd be very stupid of cell companies not to use phone signal lag to compute position of the phone itself. One can do it with 2 receiving nodes with a decent accuracy. Now recall that normally cell is comprised of 6 or more nodes - this is massive data redundancy, which should allow for very good accuracy.
IMO, this functionality has always been in the cell systems. How and when it's used is another question.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
He had significant evidence to blame the FBI, or some similar group. Not proof. Could have been rather strange burglars. But evidence.
The odds are, however, that it was some government group acting in a sub-rosa manner. Or, possibly, violent literary critics.
(At that time he was living in Berkeley, and he wouldn't have been the only person to be illegally searched, in-absentia, by official groups. Sometimes it was even either proven or admitted. Usually you could only surmise because the people it happened to were those being frowned upon by those in power. Which is what makes his case odd. He didn't really fit the pattern.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Is this somehow better than the currently available Ground Surveillance Radar?
At least my phone can tell me where I am, telling the street name and all. The same when I check where my friends are, and it can also tell at which direction and distance they are, so it's not too difficult to find them. I don't know what's "that well" for you, but it seems to work for me. (I live in Finland).
I had mine disconnected some time ago, i was tired of being leashed, and so 'available'.. what ever happened to 'personal time'..
Stuff like this will keep me from ever going back.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's not about tracking people's phones, it is about using the signals from the cell towers as radar waves, to track ANYTHING that moves. You don't have to have a cell phone, you don't have to have it turned on, you just have to be physically in the area covered by the tower.
READ THE ARTICLES BEFORE YOU POST.
Most people, after some small period of time dealing with the Internet, ought to be more familiar with dick than Jefferson.
Smite those who moderate as "insightful" the comments of others like themselves who failed to read the article. Or in this case, who failed even to read closely the ./ posting, which clearly mentions that the cell towers are used as radar.
That's kind of my point. They'll think they know someone is there, but it's just a phone. You could carry 10 phones with you and they'd think there's a bunch of people at a particular location. Maybe only if you spread them out a bit, whatever. It's fairly usless for actually "tracking" someone as you and others have said. Anyone who doesn't want to be tracked/spotted can avoid it. This will be useful as a tool for rescuers, advertisers, traffic reports, etc, but not necessarily for law enforcement or security.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
Not knowing the physics, but using my imagination... could you get better resolution by using the signals from two cell towers as a kind of interferometer? (with enough processing)
I think tech sgt. Chen used this technique to locate Tawny Madison in Galaxy Quest ep 37, "Peekaboo". Or was it ep 38?
some asshole sat behind them talking the whole time and they were like, oh!
I doubt it's any different today - other than resolution being better (being able to more accurately pinpoint a phone's location).
Here are a few links to similar articles:
Wired
ePinions - cites 164 foot pinpointing US govt mandated
Another recorded use of triangulation
Interesting article about triangulation
Unfortunately, this is old news that has been "hidden" right in plain view of the general public.
-Rob
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
"Our ruler's will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in convulsion."
--Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on the State of Virgina" During the American Revolution
That's kind of my point. They'll think they know someone is there, but it's just a phone. You could carry 10 phones with you and they'd think there's a bunch of people at a particular location. Maybe only if you spread them out a bit, whatever. It's fairly usless for actually "tracking" someone as you and others have said.
No, they would know one person's there, they just wouldn't know who it was. The fact that you have 10 phones registered to 10 different people may lead them to believe you're stealing phones. They would have a good idea of how many people are in a particular location because it acts like radar. They would only have an idea of who those people were if they were carrying phones.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I would think that the only thing that makes this any better than current is that it's already fully deployed with almost complete coverage. I'm not sure how well deployed ground surveillance radar currently is in any country, but I'd imagine they don't have nearly the coverage of the cell system in most 1st world countries.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
One would imagine it would work best if the "listening" process can be automated. Oh, and if you are able to track people/cars between cells.
I don't see how much practical use it can be though given how poor the data would be as opposed to (say) using a pair of binoculars to watch someone!
How, pray tell, is this different from me going to the local marine supply, buying a $1000 cheapo marine radar, and driving around with it on my car (not that that's technically a violation of the radar's FCC station license.)
Oooh, there are PEOPLE MOVING in the VICINITY of a CELL PHONE TOWER! Call out the Black Helicopters!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I don't know about this technology, but the GSR (Ground Surveillance Radar) systems are superior during foggy/smoggy conditions and at night (with the exception of IR & thermal decection devices. IR has gotten a lot cheaper of late (thermals have not) But expense aside (the cell towers pay for themselves) The fact that one man can track multiple 'blips' from a computer terminal, and binoculars or tailing someone calls for more (albeit more reliable) resources. Also apparently they are developing this to see through walls. I'm sure this will degrade the resolution, but if you can track a 'blip' through a building from a command center hundreds or thousands of miles away, then you have a real advantage over optical systems.
Wireless phones are just radios. The military has been able to use triangulation to locate the source of a signal for more than 50 years. If only one cell tower is picking you up, they only know your general area. If two or more can pick you up, it is not trick to plot the direction of the signal, draw lines and where they intersect ... there you are. This would just be a fancier version of this simple "technology" which, thanks to computer data processing, could keep track thousands of radio-signal sources at the same time.
This is all happening as part of the new Enhanced 911 service infrastructure. Make a 911 call and they can find you without you giving them crappy directions.
In fact, there are companies lined up to take advantage of these so-called "location" services. Location-based services will merge with things like instant messaging to provide enhanced presence and applications.
If all this scares you, cancel your cell phone plan.
Hegelians are paranoid? i don't get it. Fatalistic maybe but not paranoid. Are you just trying to sound smart or do you actually believe you *understand* hegel?
Ah, okay, that makes it much clearer.
And I don't have a problem with it (see some other thread wandering thru here today) if it is used solely to further secure areas that are *already* supposed to be highly secure. Now, if it starts "wandering" outside of that use, particularly if used to track civilian movements in ordinary (unsecured) public places, then I have a problem with it!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
tough being a cynical optimist.
--
Power to the Peaceful
In fact the Mossad may deposit funds into your account if you would consider doing that same thing[blow up any children] in a market in the West Bank?
Cell site call logs were used in a NZ murder trial, which helped convict a dude of murder. It's not quite the tracking being discussed (as a specific phone call was needed to show that he had been in a certain area)....
The story is here...
"The analysis showed that Lundy's 5.30 pm call from his wife and daughter, which went through the Petone cellphone transmitter, finished close to 5.38 pm. He made his next call at 8.29 pm. "
Nevrar
already have http://www.mobilecloak.com/ The off switch for always on mobile wireless. A simple method of making your wireless stuff invisible to any other wireless stuff or signal that would want to communicate with it.
http://www.mobilecloak.com
The off switch for always on mobile wireless.
A simple method of making your wireless stuff invisible to any other wireless stuff or signal that would want to communicate with it.
He said his characters often are paranoid. That is something very different than saying that PKD is a paranoid about governments.
I meant Hegelian in the sense of being tied to the thesis + antithesis = synthesis paradigm, which is intolerant of the sorts of co-existing paradoxes that Dick favors in his fiction. Maybe this quote will convince you that I know WTF I'm talking about:
"What is rational is real and what is real is rational."
--Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
I don't want to pit Dick against Hegel (if for no other reason than I don't think PKD was interested in Hegel at all). But I do think Hegel is a neat shorthand for what Dick's paradigm does *not* represent.
Imagine what it will be like once criminals and spies start prancing around to avoid detection...
And I don't have a problem with it (see some other thread wandering thru here today) if it is used solely to further secure areas that are *already* supposed to be highly secure. Now, if it starts "wandering" outside of that use, particularly if used to track civilian movements in ordinary (unsecured) public places, then I have a problem with it!
Well, the real question is how far they'll go in using it. They could use it to monitor traffic flow and speed, to check the timing on red lights (ie increase/decrease the yellow time on lights to either reduce accidents or increase revenue from tickets), or to monitor any number of behavior patterns. There are a number of 'good' applications for something like this, but almost all of them can be used in a way that some (or even most) would feel is 'bad'. Even if they can't identify every single person or vehicle they're tracking (and I can think of a few easy ways to bring it to the point where you can get at least 50% identification without a single person carrying a cell phone, ie tagging a person or vehicle at it's starting point in software and cross-referencing with postal records, especially if they get accurate tracking through walls), they can flag certain areas that are known for certain types of criminal activity and then flag individuals who travel through those areas, especially those that stop for any period of time, and have police waiting to do a 'probable cause' search of the person/vehicle that was tracked through that area.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I think your "probable cause" scenario is a very likely result, if use of this tech isn't tightly controlled. Not to mention your ID technique. And law enforcement knows how to use "well, the law doesn't say we CAN'T" as well as anyone else!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"More stupid technology by clueless people for powergrabbing governments".
Hey Saeger, I must know you since you responded to an older post of mine (Oct 1) regarding nanotech and the singulairty. The singularity/transhumanist commmunity is pretty small. If your seeing this post, visit my newly revambed website at http://planetp.cc/
www.enthea.org
This may depend on the size of your wife.
Right, my question is more on what are the capability differences. I think widespread use will not be so much a factor because the usage will not be totally practical -- some areas, sure, but others, why?
Right, my question is more on what are the capability differences. I think widespread use will not be so much a factor because the usage will not be totally practical
Because I'm not a radar person myself and because they didn't publish much technical info in the article, I really couldn't comment on capability differences. I'd imagine that the fact that it's already widely deployed makes it much more practical for uses in which radar would not be considered because it would both have to be deployed in the area and maintained (and operated). How far they go with it probably depends on the operational costs of the system, the returns they can gain from it's use, and the legality of whatever they decide to do with it.
I would imagine that radar designed from the ground up as a radar system would have much better capabilities (accuracy, range, and so forth), but deployment and costs are probably limiting factors in what might be considered fairly mundane uses. It'd be interesting to see whether or not the government is considering licensing out intrusion detection to corporations or even citizens using this system, though.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I'm glad I wasn't logged in.
Noticed a problem though: all your archive links point to a munged 'floatingplanet' link.
Also, one quote of yours struck me: "I hope to publish a book about it. Hey maybe I can get lucky like those Wachowski brothers and outdo their Matrix Movie!" I'd had similar thoughts about writing a script, but remembered what Verner Vinge said along the lines that it's impossible to write the "important story" about something so far beyond our understanding. You have to dance around the subject.
--
Power to the Peaceful
--
Power to the Peaceful
True, it is just a happy coincidence that I'm reading the book at the moment, so the quote came to mind. I posted it as information really (and maybe to score a mod point, which didn't work).
Can you please explain to me in what situation anyone would risk their own safety for yours? I can't even say the police would do it...,
How about a situation where two very tall buildings have been struck by jets? I seem to remember hundreds of people rushing in to help. (Yes, I know that if they'd had a proper radio system, a lot of them might not have had to make the ultimate sacrifice, but they were still risking their lives for others.)
it's gonna happen. So let's look on the positive side.
I think it will be useful if the data can be recorded and used to reconstruct certain past events. Let's say child abductions, auto accidents, sniper shootings, etc.
And perhaps the data should be made public record at some later time to prevent the data from concentrating in the wrong hands.
My friends, I am here to tell you of the wonderous continent known as
Africa. Well we left New York drunk and early on the morning of February 31.
We were 15 days on the water, and 3 on the boat when we finally arrived in
Africa. Upon our arrival we immediately set up a rigorous schedule: Up at
6:00, breakfast, and back in bed by 7:00. Pretty soon we were back in bed by
6:30. Now Africa is full of big game. The first day I shot two bucks. That
was the biggest game we had. Africa is primerally inhabited by Elks, Moose
and Knights of Pithiests.
The elks live up in the mountains and come down once a year for their
annual conventions. And you should see them gathered around the water hole,
which they leave immediately when they discover it's full of water. They
weren't looking for a water hole. They were looking for an alck hole.
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my
pajamas, I don't know. Then we tried to remove the tusks. That's a tough
word to say, tusks. As I said we tried to remove the tusks, but they were
imbedded so firmly we couldn't get them out. But in Alabama the Tuscaloosa,
but that is totally irrelephant to what I was saying.
We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed.
So we're going back in a few years...
-- Julius H. Marx [Groucho]
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