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
Next they'll realize that they can track nerds via /. posts.
I tend to favor Orwellian paranoia myself...
TODO: Something witty here...
Take a look at here .
There you can give a permission to your friends with Sonera cellphone accounts to locate you.
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
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
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.
Nope this is different - read the article. 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.
Its easy to avoid.. just stand very, very still.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
You mean OnStar. OnStar has a GPS built in. I believe LoJack works differently by transmitting a signal that specially equipped police cars pick up when the are within a certain distance of the LoJack transmitter. Whereas OnStar is pleased as punch to send your location to the GM OnStar location.
If your truly paranoid -- don't buy a vehicle with OnStar. While it has its uses, and I'm glad my mother-in-law has it in case something goes wrong while she's by herself, I sure don't want it in my car.
I wonder how many requests for support the OnStar office gets to track cars? The use of the information from OnStar equipped vehicles are not reported on very often.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
I don't agree with your post.
It's not a typical Slasdottian/geek attitude, it's very important to think about civil rights. This has nothing to do with fingerprints. Fingerprints are taken if you are suspected of having commited something illegal.
Location tracking of cellphones is something completely different:
it can be automated, you don't realize that you are being tracked, it's easy to abuse.
You can triangulate a signal from a cell phone. By its strength to the masts picking it up. This is what you are referring to. But the article is taliking about another use for the signals. Read the article again this is not picking up people who have cell phones it is using the masts signal as radar to track anything moving in the area covered by the masts. You don't need a cell phone to be picked up by the unit. You just need mass.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
...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!
A cellphone is a radio beacon, and it is designed to localize you to enable roaming an such. If you don't want people to be able to track you, you don't continually post your whereabouts to the world. You might as well be wearing a clown suit and shooting flare guns.
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
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
*meep*
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.
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.
even the non-tin foil hat wearing folks on this board would think that your stance is a little too permisive.
"...I have nothing to hide, so if the governmnet wanted to put in a camera and a television screen that I can not control from my end, that is ok...I am sure it will help protect me"
I am sure that this is a bit far fetched of a stance for you, but it helps me illistrate my point.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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...
Apparently, the Soviet Union in Stalin's time was populated with excessive numbers of important people. Fortunately, that anomaly was fixed.
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?
actually: 3) get arrested by police who were tracking YOU with this technology not your phone.
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.
your brain is going to get quite a zap
And if you've been extra naughty, they'll have modified the masts to make you extra crispy for when the Police arrive to get you... especially with all those masts being inside petrol station price towers.
Funny thing about why you're not meant to use a mobile when at a petrol station, not because you might blow something up (compared with a cigarette) but because the signals interfere with the pump pricing system, although putting masts up on petrol stations does seem a bit wierd if those reasons hold true?
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
You mean these kitties?
Considered harmful.
Simple example: Let's say you're gay and living in an area where being gay is cause for persecution (even if it's not illegal). You may not be doing anything WRONG, but knowing everything you do sure makes it easier to persecute you.
And what if your lifestyle or religion or whatever you now lawfully do is declared illegal? Now all that observation of your formerly-innocent activities can be used as evidence against you.
And THAT is the problem with the philosophy of "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide".
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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
You write in short, assertive sentences.
:)
No bullshit digressions, long words or
subordinate clauses. You write like a man.
Even missing a few periouds now and again.
Read a lot of Hemingway lately?
Considered harmful.
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.
Not after millions of important people
were executed or died or became sick
and disabled in GULAG.
Considered harmful.
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
When was the last time government protected you? As far as I can tell, governments usually look at the big picture, ie. "how do I keep my job?" And the best way to do so is to use terrorism against the people so they live in fear. Once they are afraid, you can promise to protect them. Of course, you cannot, but at least you can watch them, just in case you need a patsy to take a fall for the latest bombing, sniping, or what have you.
YOU can protect yourself, and YOU would WANT to protect yourself. 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...
"Naturally the common people don't want war . But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."--Hermann Goering (1893-1946), creator of the German secret police, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, designated successor to Adolf Hitler. Said during the 1946 Nuremburg Trials.
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.
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..."
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 don't have anything to hide ... so I don't mind this.
Now thats an interesting attitude. Perhaps you have nothing illegal to hide (that you know of) but maybe you don't want [insert anyone] to know every step you take? You might not want your employer to know that you have been going to interviews at a compediting company? Or your wife to know that you spend more time at your local bar than you should?
A bit extreme perhaps, but i still don't like it.
Oh, did i mention that turning off your phone isn't going to help? Batteries out is the key....
If an invasion of your privacy isn't a big deal to you then I don't even know where to start the argument..
True ravers don't need drugs
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.
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
I don't know where you're from and I'm not a lawyer, but...
In America we have this thing called Habeaus Corpus (sp? actual name?!?) that prevents a person from being tried for a crime that was commited before it became illegal. While I don't agree with the original poster, I don't agree with your logic either.
I would say if the police had to have a warrant to use the technology, like they do when they put a phone tap/other surviellance, then I don't have a problem with it. Just a thought....
~Dan
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/dan.coughlin
http://www.pbase.com/efatapo
Hey, I was just trying to be funny :)
Considered harmful.
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.
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.
the point is that innocence has never been an assurance that someone will not abuse power against you. many post sept-11 muslims in the US were perfectly innocent (95% of those arrested as a matter of fact) and yet thousands were rounded up and held for 6-9 months or more on end. the japanese-americans during WWII were innocent, but were rounded up into camps. the jews in germany were innocent. and in our current times (within the last year) the government has interrogated a large number of citizens for 'unamerican activities'. the gov has also recieved thousands of complaints about 'suspicious' (dark-skinned) people who the government went on to detain, arrest, or degrade. So yes, there IS a precedent for those who have 'nothing to hide' needing protection from government power.
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
You're right. Law enforcement promises...Scout's honor...that they're not going to abuse this power. Fortunately, although we know they've abused every other technological advance, we're safe this time...because they PROMISE.
Or if we don't think we're safe, we're obviously terrorists, which makes it easier to justify monitoring us.
They're not just monitoring YOU, they're monitoring EVERYBODY. If that doesn't bother you, there are some pieces of literature I might suggest you read.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
Please reply with your email server's address, username and password. Since you don't have anything to hide, I'll publish any email you get online. Thanks in advance.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
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.
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....)
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
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.
Not at all, Phil Dick was in fact quite sure that he was being targetted by the shadowy Government forces. He strongly believed that it was some arm of the government, (which may or may not have been influenced by Proxmen or the terrifyingly named James-James opposed to Valis, the orbiting satellite which fired a pink beam of light into his head and revealed to him that he was actually living in the first century AD and speaking Koine Greek to the poor lady who came to the door) who were responsible for blowing up his safe one day in the seventies and trying to steal his manuscripts, due to the fact he was getting close to The Truth.
Despite this, he wrote some GREAT books.
No, because of the fact that human tissue is a lossy dielectric, you could not track individuals unless they are carrying something that could tx a signal or at least bounce the signal back.
From the article The system, used alongside technology which allows individuals to be identified by their mobile phone handsets, will mewan that individuals can be located and their movements watched on a screen from hundreds of miles away.
alsoThe technology 'sees' the shapes made when radio waves emitted by mobile phone masts meet an obstruction. Signals bounced back by immobile objects, such as walls or trees,
by the way, trees also would not relect radio waves if I am correct....... Remember, radio waves pass through things... otherwise you couldn't use your cellular phone in, your car, or, your house... etc.....
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
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
I know all this. I'm not saying he wasn't a good author or that he wasn't paranoid. What I meant to say was rather something like this.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
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
Actually, a system like this can track anything that disturbs the transmission of the radio signals. A body does that well. If you don't believe me, turn on an FM radio to a very weak station. Move around the radio. The signal will change.
However, the practical characteristics of the system depend on where the *receivers* are located. If they have a receiver near your house, they can probably see your body (and your cat, and your computer, and your house wiring, etc).
Trees also reflect (the technical term is scatter) radio waves. For example, I recently had to move my DirectTV satellite dish because a tree had grown in front of it and the signal was degraded by scattering and absorption.
The only good weather is bad weather.
It seems to me like this technology should be treated as many other forms of privacy intrusion, such as searching a house or bugging a telephone.
Normally it is not permitted, but under extraordinary circumstances it can be allowed after say a court order.
While I am sure someone can name examples of misuse, I am glad that the government has the capability to search houses and bug phones and by and large I think it works fine.
Similarly, if this tracking technology was only activated after a court order we could reap most of the benefits (finding lost hikers, tracking down terrorists), while avoiding most of the problems (privacy intrusion on ordinary people).
Tor
"NO! I CAN'T HEAR YOU! SPEAK UP! I'M IN A CINEMA"
Ah yes. The asshole's over there.
Let's say you're gay and living in an area where being gay is cause for persecution
And what if your lifestyle or religion or whatever you now lawfully do is declared illegal?
It seems like both of your examples assume that we already have huge problems. In these cases, I would gladly join your fight against persecution of homosexuals and against the withdrawal of religous rights.
Sure, this new tracking technology could make matters worse but so could a zillion other perfectly legal and commonly accepted technologies.
Tor
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.
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...
I don't know about the fillings, but TV sets that watch you already exist. It's called the v-chip. There is good news, though. You can disable it.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Why do I need to hang so quick? Since I don't intend to blow up any children at a Tel Aviv mall any time soon
Make sure to use exactly those words when you're explaining to the shotgun-toting FBI agents who swoop in on your triangulated position why they've got the wrong guy.
The enemies of Democracy are
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
Arm the heat seeking missiles. Lets see if it blocks EM radiation...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
You have the right idea, but you've made it worthless by hanging the idea on the type of government in general, and not on the character of the government at the time.
The U.S. was still technically a democracy during the fifties, but McCarthy sure managed to find a lot of people "important" enough to spy on, didn't he?
You have to understand that your observation has nothing to do with the actual organization of government (dictatorship vs democracy) and everything to do with the character of the leader. A leader with dictatorial tendencies can be as bad as a dictator, when it comes to distrust. This goes for your President, head of the FBI, or the Sheriff of your little town of good ol' boys.
People who think privacy isn't important because we live in a democracy and democracies don't spy on people are living in the same mythical world where communism makes all people equal.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm from America, and increasingly it looks like habeus corpus is dying along with the rest of the constitution.
Having a warrant is one thing; theoretically at least, that has some checks and balances behind it. Unfortunately it's too easy to use the ability to do blanket surveillance to track and/or harrass "undesirables".
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Yes, MANY different processes and technologies could be used to track people for any number of reasons. (Lack of high-tech surveillance methods certainly did little to prevent Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia from tracking *their* "undesirables".) But technology is making it easier, and given the general political climate, I'm inclined to think that the easier it becomes, the more ripe it is for abuse.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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?
That's sooo lo-tek. :-)
Money for nothing, pix for free
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.
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.
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
I believe it was James Forrestal, SecDef, who was confined to Bethesda Naval Hospital for acute paranoia, as he believed he was being followed by Israeli secret agents.
After he jumped from the 16th story, it was discovered that he was, in fact, being trailed by Israeli secret agents.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.