In principle yes, though not nearly as precisely as GPS; however a foreign SIM will be much harder to connect to an individual in France.
Seems UK surveillance practice is going further than EU or France
I am not sure facial recognition technology has overcome the original issues regarding misidentifying non-caucasians. I would hope this is demonstrated well and truly fixed before the cameras becomes ubiquitous.
What we really need is more âspyingâ on the government!
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You do know that every mobile phone operator in Western Europe has a Legal Intercept Room in their network operations centre?
Person from Government Agency X rocks up with ID, Warrant and numbers of phones they want to monitor. Network tech sets up room as per Warrant and lets Government person in.
The only things that may be secure from such Legal Intercepts are messages sent using additional end to end encryption such as iMessage and WhatsApp. I say âmayâ as the NSA can be rather persuasive if they want the keys to encrypted things.
It is safe to assume that anything made by Huawei is not secure at all.
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I forget to take a phone most of the time I go out, they wonât know where I am!
I suspect some of us are going to acquire a few burner phones and sims if we want to stay incognito.
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From 2G onwards, phones have always reported the signal strengths and signal qualities of the current serving cell and that of neighbouring cells.
As the network knows the absolute physical location of said cells, their radio frequency pathloss values and the transmission power being used every mobile connected to these cells; a computer model with this data being fed the target phoneâs measurement reports should be able to get a positional fix equal to that of GPS.
Book codes and dead letter drops are the way to go.
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I would expect the values to be distorted by signal passing through buildings etc.
Some cars which are fitted with a device which says where you are.
Indeed. I previously worked for a Telco and due to my role had security clearance and access to almost all areas⌠My team, amongst other things, was required to respond instantly if access to the radio network had to be restricted, e.g. stopping non-VIP users connecting due to potential terrorist activity. But even so the dedicated LI area was off limits to me and the rest of my team.
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My son has a tracking emergency system that he can activate in the roof if they have an accident and need help and it alerts the gendarmerie/pompiers etc Came with the car already fitted at VW.
True, but the receivers in the various cell sites would be able to average out any multi path distortion and delay.
Yes it has, at a recent security expo I attended I was to put it bluntly, bloody shocked by how much detail they could obtain.
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@NotALot âŚPerson from Government Agency X rocks up with ID, Warrant and numbers of phones they want to monitor. Network tech sets up room as per Warrant and lets Government person in.
Very true, i ran substantail mobile service provider in mid '90s and remember having to hand over user information even then.
But itâs all a matter of balance, if a relative or close friend was physically attacked and badly hurt and the perpetrator was successfully bought to justice using the technolgy under discussion would the people arguing against it not be pleased?
To be clear i worry about state and corporate surveillance (and am not comfortable with the increase of Big Brother) but merely comment that there are two sides to every coin!
Agreed but the agencies seem to have a double headed coin.
I reckon a goodish fix is possible but equal to GPS? No, not sure I buy that.
You need bearing & distance for a fix - the former, maybe within an octant (45°), the latter - even if the operator knew the likely attenuation of every point in the field of view of the transmitter there are too many dynamic influences - is the phone in a pocket, a vehicle, on the ground floor, first floor or higher, what is the orientation of the phone with respect to the tower?
Admittedly one thing in favour of pinning down a phone from cell tower data, is that cells are getting smaller and smaller - for 5G cells could be as small as 50m (particularly in cities) and probably not bigger than 600m (for comparison a 3G cell can be up to 4 miles or so depending on local topology) - that definitely helps
I reckon a 5G cell could locate a phone to a 25m radius under ideal circumstances, GPS should be 10m or better (I think 5m is the current resolution under prefect conditions).
Is that data available from the towers - not sure, I suspect @NotALot could âtell us, but there again, probably wonât 
Iâd expect session keys to be generated randomly and to be ephemeral so tha NSA can go whistle; why do you t hink they want the back doors in the first place.
HTTPS is actually quite secure enough at the moment, also itâs not necessarily that easy to snoop someoneâs data - maybe in the mobile network as NotALot hints but in the wider network not so much. Iâm not sure of the current position but at least a few years back mobile operators could not typically say what IP address was assigned to a user - they simply didnât log it.
and probably has been for a long time only we the peasants didnt know.
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Back in the 2G days, youâd be correct as the base stations werenât accurately time synced and nobody wanted to fork out for a bunch of additional location measurement boxes to make it work only to get 50 metres accuracy.
Now that the entire 4G and 5G networks are fully time synced, I think itâs entirely possible to feed live network data into a Widget that could run Observed Time Difference Of Arrival (OTDOA) modelling and equal GPS accuracy.
5G does indeed make this much easier, especially when using the millimetric frequency bands where cell radius is one a few hundred metres.
Bloody hell! - it seems that I was out by an order of magnitude - Ericsson claim 3m doable with a sub 1m target and they are rolling it out as a commercial offering
5G though - I donât have a 5G phone, 4G only and itâs only 3 years old so not (quite yet) pre-historic.
That said the police donât necessarily need super accurate location info from the GPS tower - in district X of town Y at time Z might be all they need to build a case.
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