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Ask Slashdot: How To Stay Ahead of Phone Tracking ?
An anonymous reader writes "In the last few years there has been a significant upsurge in subverting the cellular network for law enforcement purposes. Besides old school tapping, phones are have become the ideal informant: they can report a fairly accurate location and can be remotely turned into covert listening devices. This is often done without a warrant. How can I default the RF transmitter to off, be notified when the network is paging my IMSI and manually re-enable it (or not) if I opt to acknowledge the incoming call or SMS? How do I prevent GPS data from ever being gathered or sent ?"
The issue is that the government does not wait until they think you *are* a criminal to do this stuff, they start doing it when they think you *might* be a criminal, or worse yet, when someone *wants* you to be a criminal. It's not the stuff that would actually manage to fetch a warrant that a lot of people are worried about, it's the fishing expeditions that lazy crime fighting agencies and power abusing bureaucrats engage in if they don't like some of your associations. Just look to what happened during the McCarthy era to see what can happen when persons in power don't like the idea of you exercising your right to free association with people they don't like, regardless of if any rules are being broken.
As you know, they can track you even when the device is off, unless you've taken the battery out.
I don't dispute it's possible that the phone while 'off' is simply in standby and pops on now and again to ping the network.
But.. if so, why does my Galaxy S3 take 10+ seconds to 'boot up' after it's been turned off, and then another 5-10 seconds before it has service?
There might be some phone out there that is 'always on'... but is there actually one? More than one? Is it actually common?
This seems more 'urban ledgend' / paranoia then real -- the sort of paranoia where you think the NSA has installed a rootkit to simulate your phone shutdown sequence when you turn it off while it remains transmitting. Possible, theoretically? Sure.
But then what makes you think taking the battery out will work? The NSA inserted a secondary battery with enough juice to keep tracking you for days even when the battery is out. Better put the phone into your pocket faraday cage...
And take a shower and change your clothes to rinse off the micro RFID they hid in the dirt on your shoe and are tracking with a satellite equipped with some sort of super pringles antenna...
I think my Galaxy S3 is off when I turn it off. I'm prepared to be educated that it really isn't, but I need more than some handwaving or links to rumors on some guys dubious blog.