So it is reported ad nauseum every few years that this ability to track cell phones that are powered off and even with battery removed is not only possibe, but it is being actively used for the last 20 years.
I find this all very hard to understand. Citing a person who wants to sell you a metal bag to keep your phone in when you get up to no good certainly isn't helping.
If power is required, presumably the phone baseband has to wakes up and do something. A researcher could easily detect this by monitoring the power consumption or the local RF environment. Also baseband engineers and phone electronics manufacturers all have to have basically their entire design and engineering staff looped in to provide for this functionality. Where is this data?
If power is not required, nobody has yet presented any satisfactory explanation of how such passive tracking could even be possible over a wide area without being in very very close proximity to the device or having an unbelievably dense active sensor network. (NFC, silicon junction detection/fingerprinting, etc.) If this type of passive tracking is possible, then it certainly would not require that the device being tracked is even a phone.
I agree with your logic. It's just that the "researchers" thing just doesn't smell right for me. You hear constantly about researchers finding malware/spyware related to Chinese hackers, to Russian hackers, to North Korean hackers. No researcher has ever found anything related to American hackers, European hackers or Israeli hackers. Either western state hackers are so good that researchers never find out what they do, or researchers get a visit from two guys in a black suit when they find something relevant and decide not to publish anything.
Are you just going to ignore the massive amount of research done by Citizen Labs in exposing the use of Israeli spyware to surveil journalists and activists?
Squint enough and you'll see a cellphone consists of two primary chipsets: a main SOC/stack that runs the operating system, and a modem/software stack that pushes cell packets. Power the phone down and you (may) fully shut down the OS/processor; you likely aren't powering down the modem.
If I were putting a back door in cell modem silicon to track the device when it's totally powered off, I'd do something like a passive RF bug. Surely you could get something like an RFID circuit to hang off one of the many antenna in a phone. Then you just give it a path to a unique id, maybe derived from the MAC or something.
Julia Stiles "Nicky Parsons" in the Bourne trilogy removes her battery when being chased by an assassin from the coffee shop, Jason finds it smashed on the pathway and you would think that in a spy film the bad guys would still be able track her.
I don’t have an ee/hardware background but given two things I can naïvely assume this is possible.
1) Nowadays, we can send text messages directly through satellites in space. So the satellites are obviously sensitive enough to pick up whatever is being admitted from the phones.
2) I forget what they’re called, But for more than a few decades, now the way the bug detectors work is by relying on some physical properties of transistors when exposed to some EMF maybe, even when off.
So yeah, with like advanced modern sensors and AI power signal processing maybe it is possible.
Someone with an EE background can sign in and tell me why maybe 2 is not possible from space
So the man that sells Faraday pouches to put your phone in. Says the NSA can track your phone if you don't use his product. With no further technical information?
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I find this all very hard to understand. Citing a person who wants to sell you a metal bag to keep your phone in when you get up to no good certainly isn't helping.
If power is required, presumably the phone baseband has to wakes up and do something. A researcher could easily detect this by monitoring the power consumption or the local RF environment. Also baseband engineers and phone electronics manufacturers all have to have basically their entire design and engineering staff looped in to provide for this functionality. Where is this data?
If power is not required, nobody has yet presented any satisfactory explanation of how such passive tracking could even be possible over a wide area without being in very very close proximity to the device or having an unbelievably dense active sensor network. (NFC, silicon junction detection/fingerprinting, etc.) If this type of passive tracking is possible, then it certainly would not require that the device being tracked is even a phone.
If I were putting a back door in cell modem silicon to track the device when it's totally powered off, I'd do something like a passive RF bug. Surely you could get something like an RFID circuit to hang off one of the many antenna in a phone. Then you just give it a path to a unique id, maybe derived from the MAC or something.
Julia Stiles "Nicky Parsons" in the Bourne trilogy removes her battery when being chased by an assassin from the coffee shop, Jason finds it smashed on the pathway and you would think that in a spy film the bad guys would still be able track her.
1) Nowadays, we can send text messages directly through satellites in space. So the satellites are obviously sensitive enough to pick up whatever is being admitted from the phones.
2) I forget what they’re called, But for more than a few decades, now the way the bug detectors work is by relying on some physical properties of transistors when exposed to some EMF maybe, even when off.
So yeah, with like advanced modern sensors and AI power signal processing maybe it is possible.
Someone with an EE background can sign in and tell me why maybe 2 is not possible from space