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Government spying on your location using cell phone triangulation?

Madhatter4

Madhatter4

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Feb 25, 2002
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We all know the government can roughly track your location using cell phone tower triangulation. Is there any way to get around this? could you simply turn off your cellphone or can they track you regardless? It just freaks me out that big brother knows where I am at all times....

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I'm pretty sure they track you through the GPS. That's how they can find you when you dial the emergency number. Cities are also saturated with surveillance cameras that can feed data to machines running facial recognition software and license plate readers.
 
^^^Ok so if your referring to the GPS built into the phone, does turning off the phone prevent the government from locating/tracking you?
 
Yes, no, maybe. Smartphones don't have replaceable batteries and sometimes turning it "off" just means putting it into a sleep mode, which often leaves networking devices on the board in a standby mode allowing for remote commands to wake the phone. Old skool phones don't do that, when you turn it off it really becomes inert. Triangulation while the phone is on can be tricky. Your rough location can be found with just one tower, the one closest and/or with the strongest signal to your phone, but it's impossible to tell which direction you're in from that tower unless there are two other towers nearby that your phone is communicating with also. Nowadays there are cell sites on top of practically every building so that's made the job easier but only in terms of nailing your rough location on a 2D map.

Ars did an article recently covering facial recognition technology and the conclusion was basically that any sort of shadow or attempt to camouflage features on a person's face would completely throw off the accuracy so long story short it still requires a person to analyze footage to get good results. In the UK there are devices active in London now recording the MAC address of passerbys which is a better way of doing things because usually on those SoC devices the MAC is written into the firmware and can't be changed without basically recompiling the whole OS.

If you have a smartphone and are paranoid, you can leave it in your microwave when you're at home and wrap it in tinfoil when you're out n about forming a quick n dirty faraday cage.
 
Have you used an ATM to get out money today? Did you drive your car along a toll road? Ever notice those plastic dome CCTV cameras everywhere?

Personally I'm not that interesting for big brother. He's too busy zooming in on my girlfriends tits to take much notice of me
 
Faraday cage would be the only solution to this. A smartphone would always send out waves to nearby cell towers and/or satellites, but the FCC can provide that it won't be doing that if you turn your phone off. If you are really skeptical about it, just take the battery out and only use it when you need it.

Or, you make an IMSI catcher and throw them off yourself. ;)
 
haha imagine getting a call "this is a collect call from the NSA, will you accept the charges?"
 
Electrochromic plate covers? Highly illegal isn't it? Good luck on your ventures my brother. Anybody with a good eye or a traffic stop could mean bye bye.

Hopefully you are using a proxy and tls/ssl to connect to bluelight, as well not using a wired connection to a neighborhood ISP. Watch the MAC address, and encryption can be your best friend.
Just saying. Big brother is watching everything, especially on the Internet. If you were interesting, I'd be sure you were already found a long time ago.

Building that case however..... is something entirely different. ;)
 
a) the point of a proxy is to give the user a foreign IP and MAC. If you start with the latter two then the proxy is only useful in adding an extra hop
b) if you didn't personally set up and set yourself as the only admin on the proxy server there's no guarantee that the encrypted data won't be intercepted and deciphered by whomever else may be admin.

Encryption is sort of like a castle with a moat. At a glance it looks like an impregnable fortress but if you've left the drawbridge down and gate open then those impressive walls are all for naught.
 
Well thujone.

A) Foreign IP and MAC? Really now? Sure, run it through the onion and it's a lot more than an extra hop. I didn't add extra details in such as maybe those ICMP requests or packet manipulations (privoxy), and ARP tables are quite a beauty you need to watch. Reverse engineering a trace is quite a fascinating story.

B) Of course, any first or last node that you encounter would have access to the clean, unencrypted data. If you were someone "interesting" to big brother, I'm quite sure it has to be because you are working on the federal (international) scale. I'm sure if you were well-connected, you would either have a proxy yourself or know the administrators of those servers. If you actually didn't want to be watched, you would need to keep a fake presence that they would be aware of. It would be suspicious if you somehow had no type of activity going on that they can trace. But a new beautiful invention (pretty old now) called Wi-Fi paved the way for a whole level of the anonymity game. Now you can just freeload off of somebody else's bandwidth with a DHCP acquired IP address straight from a random residence's router.

How do you trace a war-driving laptop?
 
In war zones like Colombia, Afghanistan, etc people turn off phones and take out the SIM card I guess just turning it off you could still possible be tracked, the SIM card needs to be out. Many places they believe that they can track phones and take you out with the cords by drone. idno? but it would not surprise me, the government agencies don't publish tracking methods until they are old and replaced or get leaked.

I think eventually if not already they will just collect and store all gps crods of phone users, that way they can have a pattern and history of where everyone has gone.

So a crime happens at Main st &1st st they could gather all people that were in that location at that time. then run queries on age, height, clothing?, to narrow down the suspects. But the criminal is probably smart enought to leave the phone at home so the police___? prosecute the next likely suspect ?
 
justaddictedddd said:
Well thujone.

A) Foreign IP and MAC? Really now? Sure, run it through the onion and it's a lot more than an extra hop. I didn't add extra details in such as maybe those ICMP requests or packet manipulations (privoxy), and ARP tables are quite a beauty you need to watch. Reverse engineering a trace is quite a fascinating story.
Click to expand...

I was responding just to the information you made available, which did not originally include details like onion routing.

B) Of course, any first or last node that you encounter would have access to the clean, unencrypted data. If you were someone "interesting" to big brother, I'm quite sure it has to be because you are working on the federal (international) scale. I'm sure if you were well-connected, you would either have a proxy yourself or know the administrators of those servers. If you actually didn't want to be watched, you would need to keep a fake presence that they would be aware of. It would be suspicious if you somehow had no type of activity going on that they can trace. But a new beautiful invention (pretty old now) called Wi-Fi paved the way for a whole level of the anonymity game. Now you can just freeload off of somebody else's bandwidth with a DHCP acquired IP address straight from a random residence's router.

How do you trace a war-driving laptop?
Click to expand...

My question is why bother encrypting communications at any point if the user is starting from some random WiFi router's address with a spoofed MAC? That just makes no sense, because the proxy creates a constant. If you were to just send data unencrypted from a random router's address, it would already be completely anonymous (provided no background apps are leaking data), but once you have to authenticate yourself to a server and start sending all traffic through that address it becomes easier to affiliate that traffic with a single user.
 
The government has been spying on people since the day it was invented. Nothing you can do about it... It comes with the privilege of using Phones/internet Etc.

I'm not to worried about them spying on me... I don't care... The only one I'm concerned with watching me is God, he's/she's the only one that can judge you. Not to mention He's/she's not only spying on your physical actions but your thoughts as well....OOOOoooooo Spooky...
 
GodandLove said:
I'm not to worried about them spying on me... I don't care... The only one I'm concerned with watching me is God, he's/she's the only one that can judge you. Not to mention He's/she's not only spying on your physical actions but your thoughts as well....OOOOoooooo Spooky...
Click to expand...
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