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FYI - RE WEEEKEND EVENTS OUT HERE
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 1994 02:15:15 -0400
Subject: THE GREAT FREEWAY CHASE & LAW ENFORCEMENT Date: Sun, 19 Jun 94 20:46:58 PDT From: "Willis H. Ware" <willis () conrad rand org> - ----------- Folder: YES - ----------- RE: the weekend's events. You probably watched the nationwide TV coverage of the O.J.Simpson freeway chase. The Sunday LATimes had a collateral article titled "Fugitive relied on and was undone by cellular phone." Of special relevance to many current interests are some comments about tapping and tracking a cellfone. Salient points are: 0. Simpson had apparently made several calls from his cell phone and had also been contacted several times on it by law enforcement. 1. Cell company involved was AirTouch Cellular which is the new name for PacTel's recently spun-off cell business. 2. The reporter had obviously interviewed a Michael Guidry, of the Guidry Group, Houston, TX, security consultants. It isn't completely clear what things originated from him. 3. The company said that "law enforcement had subpoenaed the company to help". The surrounding context would suggest that it was LAPD but the affair at the time was in Orange County so it may have been the OC Sheriff. Throughout everything I read today in two papers, there was NO mention of FBI, only of local and county authorities. 4. " Monitoring would have made Simpson's capture inevitable as long as he continued to use the phone ... technicians at a [cellular control] station began monitoring calls made by and to the car phone of the Ford Bronco [containing Simpson and Cawlings]...." "..cellular tracking is extremely beneficial, it's an investigative tool of the future [says Guidry]..." 5. "Within a cell site, LE officers ... use triangulation equipment to zero in on a particular caller [Guidry said] ..." 6. "Eavesdropping on cellular phone calls is illegal without a wiretap warrant, even for AirTouch as it scans for cellular fraud.... In Simpson's case, LAPD got a court order allowing them to track down the fugitive ..." 7. "If [Simpson] had used his phone in an apartment, " Guidry said, "officers with triangulation equipment could have pinpointed his call ..." It appears that the idea of triangulation came from the consultant. Maybe it's for real, maybe it's an extrapolation of well known direction finding techniques from the military and other fields. We all know how triangulation works but it would take some pretty modern equipment to DF a moving target whose linear velocity was limited to 50MPH or less, but whose change of angular position relative to the DF site could have been large. 8. The LAPD obviously had a very compliant judge to get a fast wiretap warrant, OR they did the paperwork after the fact. 9. AirTouch apparently does some kind of security scanning to look for fraud although it does not eavesdrop. I suppose it looks for IDs of fones that are reported stolen or perhaps for duplicate IDs. It was evidently this equipment that allowed the control station to monitor the Bronco. While the facts are far from complete, the evident success and ability to track a cell fone is in sharp contrast to the impression that the FBI has conveyed around Washington, apropos of its digital telephony proposals. If you want to look up the whole article which is about 24 column inches, it's page A11 Sunday 6/19 LATimes, home delivered edition; writer is Dean Takahashi. ------- End of Forwarded Message
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- FYI - RE WEEEKEND EVENTS OUT HERE David Farber (Jun 19)