Sunday, October 09, 2005
 
What I Want For Christmas: A Lead Carrying Case For My Cellular Phone
Missouri: State Spies on Drivers Through Cell Phones:
    The Missouri Department of Transportation will spend $3 million annually on a program to monitor the movements of individuals on highways via their cell phones -- without their knowledge or consent.

    Delcan NET, a Canadian company, developed the system which triangulates the location of each driver by monitoring the signal sent from the cell phone as it is handed off from one cell tower to the next. Each phone is uniquely identified and the information is compared with a highway map to record on what road each motorist is traveling at any given time. The system also records the speed of each vehicle, opening up another potential ticketing technology.
I don't know how trustworthy of a source this is, but apparently Radley Balko believes it. Even if this story isn't true, it's only a matter of time.

Makes the picture below more appropriate, no?


- posted by Brian J. @ 6:55 PM
Comments:
Hum - I'm not sure about this one. Working in cellular technology I can tell you that this sort of thing doesn't work unless the cell phone companies are in cahoots - and the one I work for isn't.

It is the triangulation part that is tricky, or rather, the way in which that data is sent over the ss7 network to the 911 call center. Aribitrarily re-routing this information to MODOT as opposed to the local 911 center would by difficult. Also, the data push typically just happens once, at the beginning of a call, and not as the call roams.

So, it could be done, but the stars would need to be in alignment, and they are not so aligned for the vast majority of small cell companies.
# posted by Blogger bucci : Sunday, October 16, 2005 11:22:00 PM
 


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