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.
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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.