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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."
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....
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.
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.
What is new, however, is what this article is talking about: using the cell masts (the antennas that allow people to have cell service in an area, not the phones themselves) as a radar to track everything in a particular area. You don't have to carry a cell phone to be tracked, thanks to the fact that (almost) everyone wants cell service everywhere all the time.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Oh, and this article has nothing to do with that. It's about using the radio waves emitted by the cell phone towers as a form of radar - detecting how the radio energy bounces back from buildings, submarine periscopes, airplanes and people with tinfoil hats. You should read it, it's actually very interesting.
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Roke Manor is the former research centre from Plessey and specialised in radar and communications.
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.
Don't you get it? That isn't the point. It doesn't matter anymore if you use a cellphone or even own one. This technology uses cell towers like radar dishes to view an image of ANYONE and ANYTHING within range. You simply can't avoid it.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
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!
Well, one day you might be. Maybe you'll survive a rail disaster and make the mistake of trying to bring the negligent parties to justice? Then you'll see exactly how important the government thinks you are.
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
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]
Pulse compression is a great technology, but it requires some circumstances that we don't have here. First, the spread codes for CDMA have a large number of bits compared to most systems used in radar. Second, the synchronization would be non trivial in this case, partly due to the wide spread. Third, the power is variable to enhance overall system performance.
If someone could tackle the sync problems with making a CDMA signal into a usable bistatic emitter, then there might be a low update (when you get a strong output signal), or short range application that works well.
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
I don't think it is even pinging your phone - it is pinging *you*. As a conductive object, you reflect RF - including the RF generated by mobile phone masts. As you move, you change the pattern of reflections. The pervasive mobile phone masts create a kind of universal radar transmitter receiver, so the only thing that the snooper needs to carry to spy on you is a receiver.
OTOH, all they will see is that a person is moving hither, thither and yon. They woundt see what you are doing or hear what you are saying.
So, from the Civil Liberties point of view, this is no worse (but no better than) universal CCTV surveillance. There will be nowhere you can go - above ground, out of doors - that they can't watch you. I am skeptical about the "through walls" bit - through some walls, some of the time, but my mobile often loses signal indoors - and if I don't get enough signal to recieve, I am surely not reflecting much.
The signal is unlikely to be detailed enough to identify you, so all that they can tell is that a human is moving. This could be useful in two ways. As the article says, monitoring "no humans allowed" areas like security barriers round military and nuclear installations. And tracking someone once they have been identifier - e.g. tracking the kidnappers as they run off with the ransom money. But there would be a *lot* of ways of shaking such a tail an an urban area - if you knew it was happening.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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As for the cell thing; some localities are doing a primitive version of cell phone tracking already in order to monitor traffic conditions.
All they have to do is monitor the speed at which cell phones move down a roadway (being handed from tower to tower) and they can determine the approximate speed of traffic on that roadway. They don't need to know specifically which user is where, just that the average speed of all cell phones on that system is X MPH.
Obviously this can also help them spot potential problems; when the cell phones all slow or stop unexplicably.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.