BY MICHAEL EVANS AND NIGEL HAWKES
MOBILE PHONES can be used as tracking devices to pinpoint users within a few hundred yards, according to a report yesterday.
Sonntags Zeitung, published in Zurich, said Swiss police had been secretly tracking mobile phone users through a telephone company computer.
"Swisscom [the state-owned telephone company] has stored data on the movements of more than a million mobile phone users and can call up the location of all its mobile subscribers down to a few hundred metres and going back at least half a year," the paper reports, adding: "When it has to, it can exactly reconstruct, down to the minute, who met whom, where and for how long for a confidential tte--tte."
Swisscom officials confirmed the practice but said information about mobile phone customers was handed over only on production of a court order. The newspaper claimed that about 3,000 base stations in Switzerland tracked the location of mobile phones as soon as they were switched on.
Renato Walti, an investigating magistrate in Zurich who specialises in organised crime, told the paper: "This is a very efficient investigation tool."
Toni Stadelmann, head of Swisscom's mobile phone division, is quoted as saying: "We release the movement profile of mobile telephone customers on a judge's order."
In Britain, six mobile phone companies are understood to have arrangements with law enforcement agencies to provide coding information on individual phones used by suspected terrorists or serious criminals, but there are legal and procedural restrictions. As in all intelligence and police work, according to one intelligence source, technical surveillance is carried out only for what the source described as "focused" operations on key individuals.
"Some people might think the law enforcement authorities are tracking every mobile phone user, but that is complete nonsense. We have to have our antennae out to get the critical leads, but once we've got a lead we focus on that individual and a lot of effort goes into filtering out extraneous information."
Earlier this year there was a row in Australia when police admitted that they were using the mobile phone network to keep track of known criminals. Signals emitted by the criminals' phones and picked up by local base stations were being used to pinpoint people, providing "a very valuable investigative tool", according to Sergeant Frank Helsen of the New South Wales Police Service Crime Data Centre.
The method worked even if the phones were not in use, since they emit signals automatically every half hour. Data collected by the phone companies whose base stations pick up these calls was being reconstructed to pinpoint the whereabouts of the phone users.
Chris Puplick, the chairman of the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties, protested that walking around with a mobile phone was "like walking around with a beeper or an implanted transmitter".
In the Australian case, the mobile phone companies said that they did not routinely keep the data from phones but would do so if a warrant were issued in advance. The police service declined to say how often this happened.
In the Swiss case, it appears that the data is automatically recorded.
It is true that while a call is in progress the person can be tracked with standard radio tracking techniques. It is also true that Phone Companies store the Call Data Record (CDR) for billing and marketing purposes. Most Telcos now try to store 18 months of this data (Swisscom will be about 2Tb of info after 18 months). The CDR contains the base station or cell that was being used (remember that a user in a car is likely to pass through many cells. Cells overlap depending on location and may be small (a square kilometer in a town) or large (fifty square kilometers in open flat countryside).
But the statement:
"Swisscom [the state-owned telephone company] has stored data on the movements of more than a million mobile phone users and can call up the location of all its mobile subscribers down to a few hundred metres and going back at least half a year," the paper reports, adding: "When it has to, it can exactly reconstruct, down to the minute, who met whom, where and for how long for a confidential tte--tte."
is totally implausable, we have enough problems with the volume of CDR data as it is without storing the radio direction info as well.
It is well known that subscribers may also not be the user, e.g. a man may be a subscriber twice, but may give one phone to his wife - so who is using the phone and how do you know that ?
Furthermore Swisscom have a service called 'Natel Easy-Go' where you can pay cash for a pre-paid mobile phone. Unless the person pays by credit card to re-charge the prepayment element you don't even know who the subscriber is !
Finally the Police in most countries do use the CDR information from Telcos both mobile and fixed line, and in most countries it is controlled by court order. Even the limited information that I have described as being available helps catch criminals, who like all of us are creatures of habit and normally just pick up the nearest phone !
davidw