Comment by fixermark
8 years ago
A dumb phone can be localized by cell triangulation. The US military disclosed that it was using such a technique in Afghanistan to locate Al-Qaeda targets (they disclosed this because Al-Qaeda had gotten so paranoid about he accuracy of US military operations that they had assumed they had human spies on the ground feeding the US information and began killing civilians on suspicion of spying).
> A dumb phone can be localized by cell triangulation. The US military disclosed ...
In the U.S., aren't dumb phones (or 'feature phones') locatable for E911 service?
if it doesn't have GPS, it doesn't have GPS
Using your phone's GPS requires cooperation from your phone, however, triangulation by timing is not only possible, but even required by the GSM standard, the signal continuously measures and encodes your "latency" to the tower needed so that you'll start transmitting your block slightly earlier if you're farther away so as not to overlap with the time slot possibly allocated for some other device.
It's not as accurate as GPS, but it gives a solid estimate of your location that neither you nor your phone can prevent unless you totally disconnect.
There are several ways to implement E911-like service, and at least one of them doesn't require GPS. Your phone can usually be seen by multiple cell sites, so it's just a matter of accurate timing.
What I meant was that selling location data obtained by triangulation wasn't / isn't done and would require different methods anyway.
...or maybe they had a lot of human spies to protect by telling tech stories.
> A dumb phone can be localized by cell triangulation. The US military disclosed that it was using such a technique in Afghanistan to locate Al-Qaeda targets (they disclosed this because Al-Qaeda had gotten so paranoid about he accuracy of US military operations that they had assumed they had human spies on the ground feeding the US information and began killing civilians on suspicion of spying).
they absolutely had spies on the ground who were likely civilians, eg the doctor who got bin laden's family's dna under the cover of a vaccine program. the narrative that they were only using cell tower triangulation may have a seed of truth but it sounds a lot like counterintel meant to throw off the trail to me.
To my understanding, the reveal of the use of cell triangulation was specifically to minimize civilian casualties, not to throw Al-Qaeda off the trail of spies.
I'm sure they also had spies on the ground, but I believe the explanation that innocent bystanders being killed was something they'd prefer to avoid.