Meet the 'Keyzer Soze' of Global Phone-Tracking

Meet the 'Keyzer Soze' of Global Phone-Tracking

www.wired.com

Chances are you’ve never heard of TruePosition. If you’re an AT&T or T-Mobile customer, though, TruePosition may have heard of you. When you’re in danger, the company can tell the cops where you are, all without you knowing. And now, it’s starting to let governments around the world in on the search.

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Well I saw this story and just thought to myself, 'this is too good to pass up'. It seems like just the sort of thing we like here on ATS.

I also thought how this falls under the whole trading saety for liberty idea. The only porblem is, it sounds like short of not owning a cell phone or not using certain carriers, that you don't really have a choice. For that matter, those options may not be around, or valid, for much longer.

www.wired.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Simple, don't use a mobile phone?

reply to post by Vaykun


I supposedly have the GPS turned off on my phone. Even if that works they can still triangulate the last phone call. Not perfect but they have other ways of tracking us also, not just phones.

It's hard to outwit Big Brother, he's ruthless.

reply to post by TheLoony


They can do better than that, they can do something called 'pinging' where they can measure the distance of your phone from cell phone towers and work out your location. In the hacking scandal we have over here at the moment one of the whistleblowers said that this was a common occurence at the papers he worked for.

Originally posted by lifeissacred
reply to post by TheLoony

 

They can do better than that, they can do something called 'pinging' where they can measure the distance of your phone from cell phone towers and work out your location. In the hacking scandal we have over here at the moment one of the whistleblowers said that this was a common occurence at the papers he worked for.

wrap your phone in a thick piece of aluminum foil then place in a steel case wrapped in aluminum foil.

Maybe the microwave signal can penetrate it?

reply to post by lifeissacred


Very true matey!

They detect the time it takes from several towers for 1 byte of data to be bounced of your phones OS and triangulates using the basic phone signal without use of gps.. can be accurate to within 1 metre or so when the target is not moving... in a car for example at speed it doesnt work so well.

reply to post by John_Rodger_Cornman


lol.. i think a lead lined box may work a tad better than good ol fashioned tin foil. hehe

however.. having that in place would mean that you couldnt receive calls!

Originally posted by lifeissacred
reply to post by TheLoony

 

They can do better than that, they can do something called 'pinging' where they can measure the distance of your phone from cell phone towers and work out your location. In the hacking scandal we have over here at the moment one of the whistleblowers said that this was a common occurence at the papers he worked for.

Really? i havent been following it too closely, but my understanding was the 'phone hacking' was basically just hacking into voice mails t retrieve calls, not actually hacking into a persons physical phone.
Am I wrong?

reply to post by incrediblelousminds


Whilst the 'hacking scandal' is mostly to do with voice mail hacking, there have been allegations that police style methods (like this method of tracking phones I previously mentioned) were sometimes used to track people.

Here's the article How phone hacking targets were located with help from the polce

All cellphones are trackable... otherwise you wouldn't possible make or receive a call if they don't know where the cellphone is

yep its crazy out there i loaded a so called live wall paper of maps to my virgin mobile optimus v and to my suprise it was showing me my exact location
. scary

I don't even know what a 'Keyzer Soze' is.
Seriously, what is it?

Originally posted by dethduck
I don't even know what a 'Keyzer Soze' is.
Seriously, what is it?

Not that I want to encourage any hanky-panky, but TDOA requires accurate timing between the sites. This is done with GPS disciplined oscillators. You will notice cell sites have an associated small antenna in a radome (white plastic case). That antenna is for the GPS. Jam the GPS, and the system slowly falls apart. The deal is the systems will stay in sync for a while, but without the GPS, the timing will eventually drift.

You can google disciplined oscillator to get an explanation on the technology. The old ones used quartz crystals. They are good to about 100ns synchronization. I guess that wasn't good enough because the new ones use a rubidium reference.

For accuracy reasons, the GPS antenna used for timing is designed to ignore satellites at the horizon. They are more prone to atmospheric disturbance. That also makes them harder to jam.

I got one of the old crystal models. Kind of cool. It was built by Trimble, though it uses a Motorola GPS. The crystal is ovenized.

One way to avoid this detection is to use WIFI for calls. T-Mobile calls this UMA (unified mobile access). The scheme retains the users phone number.