the 911 thing doesn't need GPS to locate the caller?

They should still be able to identify you by the device's IMEI if they know it

I read the other day that Nikia/Siemens is being sued in the USA un relation to their deal with the Iranian government to supply equipment and tehcnology to track down cell phone users.

I think that this is in relation to the news mentioned by the GP

Wrong : )

Multiple SIM cards will only work if all your contacts also change their SIM cards (and phones) at the same time, but even then it still might not work - Traffic analysis is as much about identifying patterns and locations of activity as it is about IMSI, IMEI, and a myriad of other black and white data points.

Your average phone call these days very quickly becomes two separate data streams. One for signaling (dialing info, billing, SMS, and so on), the other for voice (or modems and faxes)

SS7 is the most common signaling system now I guess - it's used pretty much right throughout the world for all kinds of telephony, including GSM.

Probably the most important thing about SS7 (from an interception point) is that it does not have to go over the same trunk or communications path as the voice call it controls, and often, frequently in fact, it doesn't.

For your average man (or woman) in the middle, this makes the step of correlating your voice in some random time slot on some random trunk against the packet switched data running through the SS7 link a tad more difficult, but given enough resources it can be done.

The cool thing here is that you would not actually need to listen to a voice circuit at all to make assumptions about who the caller or receiver are. The signaling system is that friend you love to hate. Dump thousands of those in to a big database, you can very quickly build up a picture of call associations many levels deep.

We've all heard it before, security is only as good as your weakest link, well, humans are the weakest link. They are terribly professional and amazingly efficient at being the weakest link. It takes only one (1) person with a new phone and SIM to call some obscure and very distantly related individual to link the entire spider web of call associations back to you. Just one.

To summarize - good luck with that. You'll need military like levels of training, indoctrination, and discipline to be successful : ) Edit: Conversely you would need the same attributes to spot this, though I guess this is what secret 3 letter agencies are for.

worth a read. forget about any sort of privacy in the modern age

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000

People should place GPS trackers on the judges' cars and update where they are live on the internet for everyone to see, just slap it with a magnet while the judge is waiting for the traffic light to go green, no expectation that the middle of street is private

Getting down to spy technology! I did not read the article yet as I don't care cause I know better. Cellphones can be tracked and traced even if turned off.
If turned on they triangulate cell towers, if that isn't possible they can track you by the possible movement on ground related to the celltower-range you move through (means as long as you move it is just enough to be logged in to one single cell-tower at a time). Now to the close range tricks... it is possible to locate cellphones even if turned off if you are in close range, how that works I do not know but we were meeting a Science & Technology lab for school and they showed fancy tricks... also within 5 meters the phone was traceable with removed battery. Creepy yes unusual no.

Ant this is the bullsheet part.
Well i wrote this down many times on different forums, wrote many articles about this but i write it down here too:
Phones CAN NOT BE TRACKED DOWN when they are powered off!

The answer is realy simple: when you turn off the phone, it sends a "logout" signal to the tower where it is connected, fully ignoring the fact that the tower will receive the signal, or not. After this, the phone do not sends and receives any signals, therefore become totally untrackable.


If you not belive me, then do it yourself: place your phone near to an old CRT television and turn your phone off there. You will hear the good old beep noises and flickers on your TV. This is the "logout" signal what i said above, but also randomly you hear noises from your TV even if the phone is just idle righ next to the TV. Remember the noise what you hear from your CRT TV is your phone transmit signal, the received signal is so so so weak that you not hear it on your television as noise.

OK so the phone is turned off. Now feel free to use any of your woodoo magic to force your phone to make any transmission signal, because after this, your phone will never make any noise on your TV at all.

Sorry if i was a bit fuzzy, but i hope it is still understandable.

i imagine it might be possible to detect the resonance of the antenna or somthing, dunno

Out in the real world, your 'turned off' N900 is going to be invisible. In the laboratory, sure you can induce a detectable current and radiated energy from an electronic circuit - It is also possible to sense powered passive electronics - but only because there really is no such thing as passive - every electronic circuit will radiate energy. Certain types of (extremely sensitive) purpose built equipment can detect certain types of emission - think of a fiber optic cable bent at such an angle that causes photons to leak, or the pulses sent through your keyboard cable, or the composite signal running through your AV cables, or...

Outside of a controlled environment - like the aforementioned lab, cell phones can not be remotely tracked or traced if turned off. Period.