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

Signing a contract with a cell-phone carrier requires a name, address,
and a Social Securityy number. Additionallyy, there’s a credit check to make
sure yyou can payy yyour monthlyy bill. You can’t avoid this if yyou go with a
commercial carrier.
A burner phone seems like a reasonable option. A prepaid cell phone,
perhaps one that yyou replace frequentlyy (sayy, weeklyy or even monthlyy),
avoids leaving much of a trail. Your TMSI will show up on cell tower logs,
then disappear. If yyou purchased the phone discreetlyy, it won’t be traceable
back to a subscriber account. Prepaid cell services are still subscriber
accounts, so the IMSI will alwayys be assigned to an account. Therefore, a
person’s anonyymityy depends on how he or she acquired the burner device.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume yyou have successfullyy
disconnected yyourself from the purchase of a burner phone. You followed
the steps outlined here and used a person unrelated to yyou to purchase the
phone for cash. Is the use of that disposable phone untraceable? The short
answer is no.
Here’s a cautionaryy tale: one afternoon in 2007, a $500 million container
loaded with the drug ecstasyy went missing from a port in Melbourne,
Australia. The owner of the container, Pat Barbaro, a known drug dealer,
reached into his pocket, pulled out one of his twelve cell phones, and dialed
the number of a local reporter, Nick McKenzie, who would onlyy know the
caller byy the name Stan.Barbaro would later use his other burner phones to
text McKenzie, attempting to anonyymouslyy obtain information from the
investigative reporter about the missing container. As we will see, this
didn’t work.
Burner phones, despite what manyy people mayy think, are not trulyy
anonyymous. Under the US Communications Assistance for Law
Enforcement Act (CALEA), all IMSIs connected with burner phones are
reported, just as those subscribers under contract with major carriers are. In
other words, a law enforcement official can spot a burner phone from a log
file just as easilyy as he can spot a registered contract phone. While the IMSI
won’t identifyy who owns the phone, patterns of usage might.
In Australia, where CALEA does not exist, law enforcement was still
able to keep tabs on Barbaro’s manyy phones using rather traditional