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Indian Government To Track Locations of All Cell Phone Users
asto21 writes with this excerpt from The Indian Express: "As per amendments made to operators' licences, beginning May 31, operators would have to provide the Department of Telecommunications real-time details of users' locations in latitudes and longitudes. Documents obtained by The Indian Express show that details shall initially be provided for mobile numbers specified by the government. Within three years, service providers will have to provide information on locations of all users. The information will have some margin of error at first. But by 2013, at least 60 per cent of the calls in urban areas would have to be accurately tracked when made 100 metres away from the nearest cell tower. By 2014, the government will seek to increase the proportion to 75 per cent in cities and 50 per cent in suburban and rural areas."
No doubt this is for the good of the citizens. I hope the US follows suit soon.
/sarcasm
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Having been to India narrowing a persons location to within 100 meters still could mean thousands of people. It's like when they tracked the long island serial killer when he was calling a victim's sister from Times Square. They had little chance of picking out the guy from the hundreds of other people there.
With 1B inhabitants, that's a hell of a lot of data to store. Privacy issue aside, I really wonder if there're not drowning themselfs in data...
Seems pretty obvious to me that the biggest result will be that people who are actual criminals will take pains to either turn off their cell phones, use stolen phones or just go without any time they are doing something criminal.
Meanwhile all the regular people are now even more at risk of the government or anyone else with access to this information like ex-boyfriends at the telco using this information against them.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
on a more depressing note, most govt-regulated mass-communication systems are open to this type of abuse :-/
India is so overpopulated that even if they could track your general location, they wouldn't be able to spot you in the thousands of people if they wanted to arrest you.
Really, why is it that governments feel they must track our every movement, our every interaction? The answer is that governments - no matter how well they start off - all eventually end up seeking to fully control the lives of their citizens: it seems to be some sort of unavoidable emergent property of large aggregations of people. The idea of a citizen having some degree of personal sovereignty just falls by the wayside and everybody just gets swept up in the imperatives of the government. This may seem innocuous - or even benign to the naive - but the long term result is that it is a seeking of control for the sake of having control. Being traced like this can hardly be considered to be in the best interests of individual people.
If the purpose of providing user's location in real time is strictly for saving life and health of the same user (eg. if user dialed in for emergency, or is being actively searched for as a missing person, or as a person under stress as in danger of committing suicide, or a person suffering from Alzheimer's and known to wander off, etc..) then this measure seems logical and justified. However, if the purpose of the measure is to track all the people all the time, and recording this for yet unknown reasons, than the measure is to be feared and rejected as unjustified and unproportionate. There's never a question whether or not technology helps in fighting the crime. The real question is whether society (especially democratic society) wants that kind of intrusion in lives of law obedient citizens.
2) Will people be legally prevented from removing the battery?
Because I would do one of those things if I found out someone was tracking everyone with them. Yeah, I know the US government has the power to track us, but they don't do it all the time.
Frankly, I have no idea why so many idiots think they have to take each and every call right away. I see no problem with letting a call/text go to voicemail and getting back to them on MY schedule.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
So if some person from India calls me via his cell phone, should that government have my phone number information? Will they demand to know who I am based on that information? How quickly and readily will my government hand this info over to the Indian govt.?
We are no longer simply a police-state, it has become a Global police-state.
This is very depressing for it's possible further implications.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Be the first on your block to set up a pre-paid throw-away burn-phone stand. Sheer volume of transactions, you'd be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, as long as you don't get caught...
For "normal" people, obviously:
There are 1,170,938,000 people in India.
The Taj attacks were carried out by 10 men.
Meaning 99.9999991% of the people to be affected by this are NOT the poster children/excuse for this kind of tracking.
It seems all the governments of the world are in a race to be the most onerous and most oppressive. They learn from each other, and so must we (normal peeps).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Why not implement the next step right away? Just attach a collar to every world citizen and track them. Add remote control by giving electrical shocks to the left and right, and you have 6 billion living drones. If one steps out of bound, declare them 'defective' and kill on the spot.
This just disgusts me beyond belief.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
What are you talking about? If you have a tuple with 8 bytes each, that is still only 24GB for just the data. In terms of storage, buy a machine with 128GB of RAM that asynchronously writes back to a RAID volume, what's the big deal? Maybe networking would be more of an issue, but that is probably very solvable too.
--"You are your own God"--
Given American politics, the magic word would be terrorism. I have yet to see health care used as an excuse for privacy invasion.
You don't think they do this now?
Do you use google latitude, or any of the myriad of GPS/Navigational services?
a directional antenna.
If they think this will let them catch a criminal easily, they will be foiled over and over by the smart ones.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Turns out you can't shut off tracking, that phones will not work if you manage to disable GPS tracking."
And this is complete bullshit. I have a nokia from 2 years ago that I can in fact make the GPS go completely off and the phone still works.
hardware Hacking with iphones also shows that the GPS is NOT required for operation and jailbroken phone show that the GPS really is OFF when set to off, same for android phones.
You know if you want to make things up, at least do a little bit of fact checking it makes people write you off right away when they see a blatent fabrication.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You can disable GPS completely, moron. Hell my Galaxy S has GPS that doesn't even work most of the time anyway. Not to mention there are plenty of phones with no GPS at all. Don't let these facts get in the way of patting your own back though.
Not to mention he doesn't even tell us the name of this supposed law that was passed. Apparently the people making feature phones with no GPS didn't get the news about GPS being mandatory by law.
In kolkata cell phone location tracking is already being utilized to solve a rape case where the female victim accuses 5 people who have raped her, but the locations reported by the cell phones of those accused persons show they never been in the area where the victim reported of being raped.
Wait another five years and you'll find that even without a phone, the millions of cammeras embedded anyware will give enough biometrics to big brother's computers to track anyone outside their houses. All this they will cross reference with license plates, rfid tags, cell tower information, gps inside your phone, IP addresses you use, credit card transactions, electronic wallet transactions, and some other things that I miss.
The end result will be a historic log with your every physical movement, electronic communication and economic transaction.
No way to avoid this. We are going straight to distopia. At least I can't see any way to stop it, although I hate it as much as you.
The only way to make it barely acceptable would be to get the governments and corporations to be more transparent. Good luck with that. Child pornography, terrorism and Chinese corporate spies will be used to make sure that more and more information is hidden from us.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
To be completely fair, while you are crazy and using made up facts to support your argument, tower triangulation can pretty much be used trivially to locate any one self-identifying broadcast signal(i.e. a cell phone keep-alive) with relatively accuracy. Tracking you does not require a GPS, just good coverage.
It was not a misstatement. It was making shit up. 911 calls have always required the relaying of location otherwise the system would be wireless. That E911 also requires location to be relayed was not some government post-911 plot, it's simply applying the same rules to wireless 911 calls. How would calling 911 on your cellphone be useful if you can't be located?
They could make an argument using the health care bill (since just about everything can be considered as pertaining to someone's "health") so that if an emergency exists they know where the individual is.
Since you brought up that much maligned health care bill in an apparent effort to slander it more, did you know (and I doubt if you did, or if you did, that you'd actually want it publicly known) that in 2014 all health plans in America will no longer be allowed to deny coverage because of a pre-existing condition? Also, the working poor (up to 133% of the poverty line; or roughly $12/hour for a full time worker who supports a family of four) will receive the same excellent Medicare that our elderly do. Similar worker who make up to 400% of that line (about $88,000) will have part of their coverage rebated by the feds based on a sliding scale to 97%.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
A company here in the US, TruePosition, has been offering the capability to law enforcement and military to identify the location of all active cell phones in a specific area and time. This technology has implications that go beyond simple surveillance - Here is a link: http://www.trueposition.com/national-security/
Basically, if you have a cellphone or mobile device and it is on...you can't hide. And, the profiles that can be developed from when and where a mobile device is used can be used to prevent and solve crimes and terrorist activity.
While it's not exactly as shown in the TV show "Person of Interest", had similar technology been deployed in the hills of Iraq, Afghanistan and over Pakistan, the whereabouts of OBL probably would have been known to our forces much sooner. And, for other "would-be terrorists", you should think twice before making that telephone call for your next goat sex appointment - Little Miss Molly might be bringing more than just a good time. How baaaaaaad is that?
Norway (the promised land of freedom and liberty, my ass) enacted a similar law last april, and we're implementing it this very monent.
We've already seen mass-dna-screening using phone based location data (before the law was even in legislation; seems the police already had access to this kind of data..), and lobbying for making retained data accessible to rights holder organizations without a court process (our law lumps cell phone tracking and internet access tracking together).
I agree with you on many points. The problem is that the person above was spreading blatantly false and made up "facts". This is why most people shrug off what privacy advocates say, because the most vocal and shrill exaggerate and make things up to back up their statements. So again, the person I responded to was not make misstatements he was LYING.
As a silver lining, will we know where exactly our tech support call is going now?
Gently reply
I could turn my cell phone off for a while and they wouldn't know where I had been...
Next law, citizens must own a cellular and have it fully charged and turned on day or night.
At some point the bad guys will stop carrying their cell phones, so the only people left to tract are citizens. First Skype/Google, then blackberry, and now this. Does India even have or even enforce privacy laws?
my mom posts on slashdot.
No, you can press a button that tells you it is turned off. It indeed turns off. But they can turn it back on, and you wouldn't know it. They can't-not have the capability - the hidden power is the real reason why the phone won't work if *you disable the GPS circuit itself*. I'm not talking about the feature, I'm talking about the the circuit board itself. Years ago, I read about people trying to disable the GPS hardware itself - the phone, if they succeeded, stops functioning. chop the wires, the phone won't work. They integrated the phone with the GPS. They don't want you to shut it off. They may say it is for safety's sake, and that may be, but the auxiliary purpose is to make sure that phone is tracked. The cops and the DEA use it for drug enforcement almost exclusively. People are convicted for standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And always, the future is not like the past! Because they don't have a capability today doesn't mean they won't five years from now; the GPS tracking of cars will be like that. Using the phone's firmware as an example, I will not even take bets that cars won't even start if you disable the GPS tracker integrated into the car's systems. It's a no brainer. Power=power, if they can, they will. And we're watching them do it.
And YES, of course they could use the towers to almost kinda track you. And phones had physical locations before cells.
That's why they tore all the pay phones out, or placed cameras to watch those that exist. There are a few that are still anonymous, but you must admit they are a precious and dwindling few. The object is to remove anonymity for us, but not for "them".
911 calls have always required the relaying of location otherwise the system would be wireless.
I think you mean "worthless" not wireless.
The thing is, before ~1995 few if any phones had location functionality, but you could still call 911 and tell them where you were. I would very much like to see a report of the number of 911 calls where the caller could not tell the operator his location (they always ask in case the computer is wrong). At which point we could have a debate over whether that number of cases justifies the extended cost in both dollars and privacy risk of the system. I've looked for such information in the past and strangely enough it doesn't seem to be made public.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I am hyperbolic because I don't have time to post too much nuance, but here goes; yes, they can use towers. But if so, they didn't need GPS, did they? Of course it's for tracking, for pete's sake that's what the article is about! They are mandating GPS tracking, full time, for everyone, forever, soon, in India. I can't absorb why you are calling the description of the very point of the subject crazy. It is what they are doing. *stonkered*facepalm*
GPS gives tracking precision, and probably speeds it up a tad, granting them the future ability to track everyone in real time as storage costs drop and processor speeds increase. What was not possible in 2002 (or extremely expensive) will be trivial in 2015. They laid the tracks, now here comes the train.
The E911 excuse was issued immediately after 911 and during the Patriot Act era, when they just ordered up their wish lists of must-want toys for surveillance.
We've got bureaucratic assassination laws that we can't see, we now can be dragged away in secret on American soil by military operatives, never to be heard from again, we're being set up to be tracked to the blinking atoms we breathe on, and somehow saying the truth is nuts? I'm not being dramatic enough, in my opinion. This is unprecedented, this is evil, this is insane, this is the takeover of the world by the anal and the deluded who think everything will be safer if we all sit at the table with our hands where they can see them, if I can borrow some Pratchett here. Cops, of all stripes, don't like anonymity, as it makes things complicated and unmanageable. My way of thinking is that they crimes they are looking for which actually matter are few, and the crimes that don't matter take up all their time and are used as a justification to make the world into a ever-constricting place where you have to sit in the desert to not be watched, (if an RC airship camera doesn't notice your campfire and zoom in to see what you are doing). If we are lucky, very lucky indeed, they'll go broke before they get all their toys deployed in the next half century.
We don't need this junk. They are charging our descendants a fortune for it (we won't raise taxes, so it's all borrowed money). I've a feeling a lot of it won't even work right. But that won't comfort me much when I or someone I love gets arrested because they trust their toys so completely that they can't use common sense.
Let's put it simply. The GPS tracking is part of an API of a new type of police state. Who the "police" are doesn't matter, the API does. The tech of the API varies. Location services are one, the ability to listen in on the phone is another. The elimination of anonymity is wanted and granted. The removal of laws or the mere refusal to follow them are another. Cameras are another. Car tracking is another. ID requirements to travel are another. Put it all together, and it is what we fastidiously condemned Soviet Russia for doing, what we threatened to destroy the world for, to save it from Soviet-style repression. Do recall msot Russians were okay with the police state; it was a safer place to live than Russia today. All you had to do was not piss off someone in power, that almighty "they". And they didn't have this API we are deploying over the world.
GPS gives granularity. A tower can give a location, but GPS gives them locations down to a couple of meters. Analyzed, it gives associations, meeting times, patterns of behavior. A "they" can not just know what block you are on, but who you are standing next to or walking with. Hence India.
Our country has customs against such surveillance, but those are breaking down faster than the laws that cover it. Other countries do not. India.
This is a problem that is evolving. Do remember that the tech is not static, and the signs are that it continues to grow more powerful. Hence the article about India. India is simply going first (that we know of).
It's hardly crazy to point out the bloody obvious.
If they track you for a week are they still not getting useful information?
Indeed, you could build not just a person's regular itinerary, but a network of who they are associated with. Arguably, you could build a pretty good profile of a person, including religious and political beliefs with probably high accuracy.
The New Zealand government is also discussing mandatory GPS tracking on all mobile phones. We've had a few outages of the 111 emergency services number, and they figure getting to people requiring assistance will be easier if they know where everyone is all the time.
I was shouting at the radio the other day, listening to a chat panel saying how great this would be.
Thankfully the privacy commissioner is raising objections. I doubt this will ever get beyond the discussion stage, but it still makes me shudder, thinking about it. What's next, bar-coding at birth?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
Right. So some random crazy mucking about a packed circuit board wiping traces without a wiring diagram allows you to conclude that you need the GPS module intact in order for the phone to function.
Do you see a problem with this?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
All this coming from 'the world's biggest democracy' ha!!
I find your tin foil hat insult puzzling, because 1) the story is utterly true, and 2) wrecking your insult, tin foil actually works.
So the intended mockery only shows that you just don't care... it has no other meaning. You imply that to think otherwise is crazy, or the facts are wrong, yet we are sane and you only pointing out we were right all along and somehow this makes us crazy... my head hurts
VOIP providers are required to log IP addys of incoming and outgoing, or they were about to be required to do so, last I heard. VOIP if anything gives them even better location data.
I'd go with a TOR-like mesh adhoc WiFi system, encrypted end to end. Which would be made illegal in less than a week.
It was the so-called E911 law, it was 2002, and I was paying attention. It required location tracking for emergency purposes, and it was well understood that that meant GPS wired-in to every phone. 2005 was the deadline for all phones to be so-equipped if they were to be sold. I held on to my pre-2005 phone until 2007, when my provider informed me my phone would no longer work at a certain date, would I like a free, GPS-enabled phone?
You imply I'm lying, yet this is well known. Why is ignorance on your part evidence of lying on mine?
Here: ...In 2000, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued an order requiring wireless carriers to determine and transmit the location of callers who dial 9-1-1. The FCC set up a phased program: Phase I transmitted the location of the receiving antenna for 9-1-1 calls, while Phase II transmitted the location of the calling telephone. The order set up certain accuracy requirements and other technical details, and milestones for completing the implementation of wireless location services. Subsequent to the FCC's order, many wireless carriers requested waivers of the milestones, and the FCC granted many of them. By mid-2005, the process of Phase II implementation was generally underway, but limited by the complexity of the coordination required from wireless carriers, PSAPs, local telephone companies and other affected government agencies, and the limited funding available to local agencies which need to convert PSAP equipment to display location data (usually on computerized maps). Such rules do not apply in Canada.[27]
http://bit.ly/yymPGS
FCC rules require that all new mobile phones will provide their latitude and longitude to emergency operators in the event of a 9-1-1 call. Carriers may choose whether to implement this via Global Positioning System (GPS) chips in each phone, or by means of triangulation between cell towers. Due to limitations in technology (of the mobile phone, cellular phone towers, and PSAP equipment), a mobile caller's geographical information may not always be available to the local PSAP. Technologies are currently under development to remedy this situation and improve performance.[28] Although there are now technological ways to obtain the geographical location of the caller, a 9-1-1 caller commonly still needs to be aware of the location of the incident about which he or she is calling."
Went into effect 2002 or so, wrapped up in 2005. They had a choice, triangulation or GPS, and while it was mixed at first, it's GPS all the way now, as it had to be.
It was intended for emergencies, and of course the use was immediately expanded by Homeland Security, the DEA, and other police-like entities who wanted this wonderful new trick. Cops can log onto a website and find any phone they choose. Some carry phone readers that can stripmine any phone of data while you wait, altho that of course is hogwash until I tediously have to look it up for someone who doesn't read news feeds every day.
The primary use of the GPS on phones by cops has been drug busts. It has many solid, good uses, but it also inevitably is used by domestic spying agencies. And India is just being above board about it.
Yes, because it isn't circuit damage that freezes the phone - the phone works fine - it is the fact that the phone reports that it will not function without the available GPS feed, period. That's not just a random crash - they anticipate someone trying to disable the software or hardware, and told the phone to lock up if it didn't find an available GPS feed. So, wrapping up, yes I hate a problem with the fact that the phone will not work if you disable tracking with software OR hardware. That would be the entire point. The tracking is not entirely for your benefit.
I would not have a problem, as I stated so long ago, if the hardware could be disabled with a simple circuit breaker - a button in hardware that you can push to kill the power feed to the GPS so you could opt-out. A software button is useless - it tells you what you want to hear. A command from a the phone company, and it goes on stealth mode. How else do you think the cops are tracking people with the GPS on phones? Bad guys of course "shut off the GPS". It's turned back on without their knowledge. As I assume they turn it back on in "wake up, tell me where you are, and go to sleep" mode on any damned phone they'd like.
I think "all" should be replaced by "any " in this report. I can imagine the Indian Government wanting to be able to trace the location of any nominated cell phone, but not "all" because there are too many of them. They would need to have a capability to do it on all of them. Tracking the phone is not the same as tracking the person. There is a need to be precise when discussing this emoptive stuff.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
Who needs GPS? The phone company has detected that the signal from your phone has the following strengths at the following three base stations in your area... might not be enough to pinpoint you to within a yard, but they certainly know where you are to a city block or two. And should anyone be trying to track you down afterwards, there are a lot of urban places with security cameras which may have been pointing to places inside that city block.
Plus, of course, they can take a phone of the same model as yours and walk around the whole area of possibilities, recording the resulting sets of signal strengths and matching them to the ones received from your phone. It's a lot easier to ask the staff of three shops if they saw you than to ask the staff of a hundred.
I think this measure shows the India govenment's great responsibility for their people's safety. I'm in favor of it.
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