The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

large rallies, allowing law enforcement to later identifyy who was in
attendance, particularlyy if those individuals were activelyy calling others to
join in.
Devices like these can also be used byy commuting services and apps to
create traffic reports. Here the actual account number, or IMSI, doesn’t
matter, onlyy how fast yyour cell phone moves from tower to tower or
geographic region to geographic region. The amount of time it takes a cell
phone to come and go from each tower determines the traffic status: red,
yyellow, or green. 1
Your mobile device connects to a series of cellular towers whenever it’s
powered up. The closest tower actuallyy handles yyour call, text, or Internet
session. As yyou move around, yyour phone pings the nearest tower and, if
necessaryy, yyour call moves from tower to tower, all the while maintaining
consistencyy. The other nearbyy towers are all on standbyy, so that if yyou move
from point A to point B and another tower comes into range for a better
signal, then the handoff is smooth and yyou shouldn’t experience a dropped
call.
Suffice it to sayy that yyour mobile device emits a unique sequence that is
logged on a number of individual cellular towers. So anyyone looking at the
logs of a specific tower would see the temporaryy mobile subscriber identityy
(TMSI) of all the people in the general area at anyy given moment, whether
theyy made calls or not. Law enforcement can and does request this
information from cellular carriers, including the back-end account identities
of specific holders.
Ordinarilyy, if yyou look at just one cell tower’s log, the data might onlyy
show that someone was passing through and that his or her device contacted
a specific cell tower as a standbyy. If a call was made or if data was
exchanged, there would also be a record of that call and its duration.
Data from multiple cell-tower logs, however, can be used to
geographicallyy pinpoint a user. Most mobile devices ping three or more
towers at a time. Using logs from those cell towers, someone can
triangulate, based on the relative strength of each ping, a fairlyy exact
location of the phone’s user. So the phone yyou carryy around everyy dayy is
essentiallyy a tracking device.
How can yyou avoid being tracked?