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."
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.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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]