If you are among the 200 million Americans who use cell phone then authorities might be able to search you anytime even though you don’t receive or make a call. You might have seen the Verizon where a lockstep mass embodies the network that escorts its customer all over. Well, within that ostensibly friendly crowd, a technologically advanced Big Brother is lurking.
Well, many mobile users identify that when they call, during a 911 emergency condition, for example, authorities can get access to phone company technology to search their location and at times within a few feet distance.
A minor fact: Cell phone companies are able to locate you anytime when you are within a tower range and the device is on. Cell phones have been designed to function either with GPS or pings that let towers to triangulate and identify signals. So, anytime your cell phone notices a tower, it rings it.
That is what exactly happened the previous month about a New York City assassination that tinted the presence of an in-built capability of phones to identify people even when they are not making any phone calls.
On the other hand, the news of Imette St. Guillen mesmerized the New York City news media as just the assassination of a youthful, beautiful, middle-class, and white female can. Well, one piece of proof that led to the custody of Darryl Littlejohn, a bouncer at the club and where St. Guillen was seen the very last time, was what police called “cell phone records.” Indeed, it was not a real call that sited Littlejohn at the scene of crime instead the New-York Daily News reported that police identified Littlejohn’s direction the day when the crime took place by locating the “pings” of his wireless cell phone, which were “feed” in a tower and “after that recovered from T-Mobile network by the police.”
Telecom companies and the government are not willing to publicize that tracking capability. In addition, companies will never admit the fact that they are recording the breadcrumb route of pings from a wireless phone so that they could identify, after the truth, where the mobile user had been at a given time. “Indeed, there is that potential,” says Bruce Schneier, the chief technical officer from Counterpane Internet Security. Companies like Verizon and others have the right to use that valuable information and the chances are nil that they wouldn’t advertise it if it’s legal and lucrative. This is free enterprise after all.”
However, legality can be so complicated to hold down, particularly when national security plus corporate profits are mixed up. Communications companies and the government have been frequently caught working together in highly dubious practices. Warrant-less wiretapping, now flickering cries for Bush’s accusation, was executed by the NSA using the “gateway” switches that direct calls all over the world. Almost all these switches are handled by AT&T, Sprint, and MCI.
