[privacy] AlterNet: Reach Out and Track Someone

["Fergie" <fergdawg () netzero net>]

Via AlterNet.

[snip]

Cell phone companies can locate you any time you are in range of a tower and your phone is on. Cell phones are designed 
to work either with global positioning satellites or through "pings" that allow towers to triangulate and pinpoint 
signals. Any time your phone "sees" a tower, it pings it.

That is what happened last month when a New York City murder highlighted the existence of the built-in capability of 
phones to locate people even when they aren't making calls.

The case of Imette St. Guillen captivated the New York City media as only the murder of a young, attractive, 
middle-class, white female can. One piece of evidence leading to the arrest of Darryl Littlejohn, the bouncer at the 
club where St. Guillen was last seen, was what police called "cell phone records." In fact, it was not an actual call 
that placed Littlejohn at the crime scene. Instead, according to the New York Daily News, police traced Littlejohn's 
route the day of the murder by tracking the "pings" of his cell phone, which were "stored" in a tower and "later 
retrieved from T-Mobile by cops."

[snip]

Much more here:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/36151/

Combine this location tracking capability, with the wireless
telco's inabaility to say "no" to the NSA, and the seemingly
determined attitude of the Bush administration to disregard the
FIAS court law, you have a great combination!

- ferg


--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg () netzero net or fergdawg () sbcglobal net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/

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