Subject: [NEXTEL-1] They know where you are Cellphones, chips, and radio tags are tracking people and things

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2003 02:20:17 -0400

Cover Story 9/8/03
They know where you are Cellphones, chips, and radio tags are tracking people and
things

By David Lagesse
Just about any parent of a teenager would envy Seattle attorney Pat Char.
She can track her son's whereabouts without even having to make a phone
call. All it takes is a glance at her cellphone. Not long ago, 17-year-old Matt
was at ski training in nearby Redmond. Char watched him make his way from
practice, checking as he crossed the bridge toward home. After seeing that
he had arrived safely back in their neighborhood, she headed out of the office
to join the family for dinner. All because Matt carries a cellphone that
broadcasts where it is.

Unknown to many
Americans, most of
our cellphones are
capable of doing the
same thing. Nowadays
these ubiquitous little
communicators quietly
and persistently signal
their location like
electronic beacons. It
takes sophisticated
technology to find
them, and commercial
tracking services like
the one Char uses are
still uncommon. The
real pioneers in
location technology are local emergency services. After a slow start,
authorities are putting into place gear to find wireless handsets, often much
more precisely than Char can trail her son--so that ambulances, firetrucks,
and police can be sent to the right spot when 911 calls come in from
cellphones.

Nabbed. Street-smart phones are only the most pervasive in an emerging
wave of new technologies designed to track us, our cars, and the goods we
buy. Authorities are increasingly using toll tags, those radio transmitters that
let drivers fly past toll gates, to monitor cars along an entire route as a
measure of traffic flows. Major retailers like Wal-Mart are pushing for tiny
radio tags on merchandise, which would let them trace goods in warehouses
and, ultimately, all the way to store shelves. And chips that get coordinates
from the military's global positioning system satellites, already built into
some cellphones, may soon be standard equipment in cars. Many rental
cars already have GPS systems, which help nab customers who speed or
travel outside the authorized zone.

The new location technology promises an array of benefits: emergency
services that respond better, real-time driving directions to avoid traffic jams,
and better-stocked store shelves offering cheaper goods. Still, the idea that
cellphones and other goods can be trailed unsettles some people, and
analogies to Big Brother are inevitable. Left unchecked, such technologies
"will allow corporations or the government to constantly monitor what
individual Americans do every day," the American Civil Liberties Union
warned in a recent report. Wireless carriers say their systems only pinpoint
callers if they've dialed 911--or if they have explicitly agreed to be found. But
privacy advocates say that the technology will inevitably generate data that a
detective, or an angry spouse's divorce attorney, will demand in court.

In short, the new phones, tags, and chips will keep you from ever getting lost.
The nagging fear is that they'll let others find you, whether you like it or not.

Yet it's hard to dispute the need for some kind of cellphone tracking. Perhaps
half of all 911 calls now come from cellphones, often in waves. A single
accident on Interstate 75 in Charlotte County, Fla., can spur 20 or 30 cell
calls, says county 911 director Janet Hamilton. "It adds up [when
dispatchers] have to ask every caller where they are," she says. Around the
country, an inability to trace wireless 911 calls has had horrific
consequences: a Philadelphia man tortured and murdered, his ordeal
monitored over a cellphone line by helpless dispatchers; the deaths of four
youths lost in the mists of Long Island Sound, pleading for help to saviors
who had no idea where to look. As early as 1996, the Federal
Communications Commission saw the problem emerging. It mandated that
by 2005, wireless carriers develop systems that would tell emergency
dispatchers where most calls originate, to within 50 to 150 meters.

One way companies are satisfying the FCC mandate is by equipping new
phones with GPS chips. When a caller dials 911, the carrier's network tells
the phone where to look for the closest satellites. The phone then returns its
precise latitude and longitude, which the carrier relays to the 911 center. A
second approach is to install gear on cellphone towers that times the arrival
of a handset's radio signal. Tiny differences in the arrival time at three
different towers reveal the phone's position.

Getting all this to run smoothly isn't easy. In the emergency dispatch center
for Lee County, Fla., a largely urban county on the Gulf Coast, 911 director
Matt Rechkemmer has been working with seven different wireless carriers to
bring data into the center's dispatch system. Five companies now provide
locations, each in a different format. But some data still arrive scrambled--as
is apparent when Rechkemmer tests the system by dialing 911 on a
cellphone. He watches as Sue Rausch, an operator, picks up the call. On a
computer screen, she clicks a button to pull in the caller's latitude and
longitude. Up pop the coordinates for a cell tower some distance from the
center--certainly not within the range mandated by the FCC. "That's been
happening all day, and I can't figure out why," Rechkemmer says.

Similar struggles are taking place around the country. Only 800 of the
nation's 6,000 or more 911 call centers can locate at least some callers
within the 150-meter mandate. But the rollout is accelerating, analysts say,
as the 2005 deadline approaches. The FCC complains that work would move
more quickly if cash-strapped states didn't raid special funds set up for the
purpose, which are supported by taxes on wireless subscribers and are not
under the federal government's control.

Even before the emergency systems are fully up and running, cellphone
carriers are eyeing the commercial potential of "location services." The idea
is to profit from the tracking ability, for example by alerting users to a nearby
store having a sale or--in a widely cited fantasy--sending a Starbucks coupon
to customers passing one of the coffee shops.

Many early schemes went bust, pushed over the edge by delays in the
wireless 911 system, privacy concerns, and common sense. "It'd be more
efficient for Starbucks to have an employee outside just handing out the
coupons," says Rob Bittner. But companies are trying again. Bittner's
employer, Kivera, wrote the software behind "Find Friends," the service that
Seattle attorney Char's family is using. It's offered by AT&T Wireless, the
only U.S. carrier so far to jump into location services. A California company,
Wherify, has a related approach. It has developed GPS bracelets for kids that
use cellphonelike technology to send their location in a text message to
parents, on demand. Location services are spreading more rapidly in Europe,
Japan, and even China, where a wireless carrier had a hit during the SARS
epidemic with an offer to alert subscribers if they neared a building plagued
by the disease.

These prospects don't thrill privacy advocates. Congress in 1999 said
cellphone users must give prior authorization before their location can be
used for anything but emergency purposes. "Nobody knows what that really
means," says David Sobel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Must
a consumer push a button that says "find me," or can a carrier include the
OK in a contract's fine print?

A turnoff. Wireless carriers dismiss the privacy concerns. They say they
have no incentive to harvest the data unless someone wants to use a location
service, and they add that, as a practical matter, capturing the ever changing
coordinates of the 145 million wireless subscribers in the United States
would stretch the limits of data storage. Besides, says Travis Larson of the
Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, customers are going
to turn off their phones if they feel their privacy is at risk. "And that's bad
for
our business."

Sprint, for one, leaves it to customers to turn on the GPS beacon in its
phones for any purpose other than 911 calls, and AT&T customers must
specifically authorize others to track them through its Find Friends service. In
the Char family everyone agrees to be found by others in the family. "It's a
quid pro quo," says mom Pat. "The kids get a cellphone, and I get a little
peace of mind."

Privacy advocates complain, however, that while the locator function is easy
to control in phones equipped with GPS chips, consumers can't disable
systems that rely on the towers. Companies say that without the user's
say-so, these systems track calls only when triggered by the 911 digits of an
emergency call.

Yet critics fear a court order could render such promises moot. While police
need a warrant to listen to phone conversations, the standard for access to
location data appears to be looser, says Michael Altschul, general counsel
for the CTIA, the cellphone trade group. In the past, prosecutors have used
crude location data collected by cell companies--which tower handled a call,
for example--to undermine alibis in criminal cases. Stephen Keating of the
Privacy Foundation says he expects the government to find new ways to
exploit the more powerful wireless 911 system. "New technology always
leads to unintended consequences."

Nothing personal. Allaying such concerns is a challenge for another
location-tech initiative: the 511 Driving Times project in San Francisco.
Piggybacking on the radio toll-tag system, the Metropolitan Transportation
Commission will soon collect data from readers deployed along hundreds of
miles of highways. The readers will monitor passing cars to produce traffic
reports, which drivers can hear by dialing 511. To protect privacy, the system
will scramble the information so it can't be tied to specific cars, says project
director Michael Berman: "The last thing I want is a bunch of subpoenas from
the FBI or local police."

As further reassurance, Berman's agency mailed Mylar bags to toll-tag users
so they can opt out of the tracking project by covering their tags between
tollgates. Word is that sitting on the device has the same effect, says
Stephen Roberts, a San Francisco attorney who has written on privacy
issues and location data. "I personally haven't tested if my derriere has the
same density as a plastic bag."

In five or 10 years, the car seat itself--or the driver's shoe or sweater--may
also have a chip that can be scanned by nearby readers. The world's largest
retailer, Wal-Mart, created a stir this summer by saying it wanted crates and
pallets of goods arriving at its warehouses in 2005 to carry radio frequency
identification, or RFID, chips. The tags, which broadcast a burst of data when
scanned with a radio signal, store much more detailed information than
conventional bar codes do and can be read from up to 10 feet away. By
making goods easier to identify and trace, the chips could cut waste, theft,
and loss and drastically streamline delivery, says retail consultant Scott
Lundstrom of AMR Research.

The giant chain also floated a more ambitious scheme to implant the chips in
individual consumer products. That way a "smart shelf" in the store could
keep track of goods and call for restocking, for example. Wal-Mart ultimately
scotched the test, although chains abroad are studying the technology, and
analysts expect other U.S. retailers to quietly try the tags in their stores.

Farmers already use such chips to identify livestock, and pet owners
increasingly tag their dogs and cats. One company is even selling them as
implantable IDs for humans (box). But it will most likely be five years before
the chips are widespread in warehouses and even longer before they appear
on retail shelves. Before that happens, their current cost, about 50 cents, will
have to drop to a fraction of a cent, says Jeff Woods, a retail consultant with
the Gartner research firm. Also, retailers, shippers, and warehouse operators
will have to revamp their systems to benefit from the tags. Nonetheless, "I
think there's something huge here," says Woods. "It's going to have a major
impact on retailing over the next 20 years."

Critics worry that chips on clothing, toys, or electronics will expose
consumers to later invasions of privacy--some envision powerful radio gear
reading the tags from a distance to see what's inside a house. One solution
might be to disable them at the checkout counter, although that would keep
the technology from benefiting people at home, says Woods. Refrigerators
armed with readers could send an alert when the milk is getting old, and a
washing machine could scan the clothes in its tub and set the best wash
cycle. "Red clothes no longer would bleed on white clothes," he says.
Presto! No more pink underwear.

David Clement of Houston sees more serious benefits to the new era of
automated tracking, which brought an ambulance to his wife when she was
incapacitated while driving across town. Her Chevrolet Suburban came
equipped with OnStar, a system that combines a cellphone with a GPS
receiver, with private operators ready to offer assistance. When his wife
became ill and had to pull over with their three kids in the car, 9-year-old
Victoria pushed the OnStar button to summon help. "Up until then, I'd just
thought it was a toy," says Clement. "I'm a believer now."

Map quest. Location technology won't come into its own as either boon or
Big Brother until some mundane details get sorted out--such as maps.
Rhode Island, for example, is the only state to have a statewide 911 tracking
system fully up and running. Like every other system, it pinpoints each call
by latitude and longitude, but what emergency teams need to know are street
addresses and directions, says 911 director Ray LaBelle. "If I give an
ambulance driver latitude and longitude coordinates, he's going to tell me
where to go." Making the translation isn't easy: Most city maps don't have
accurate geographic coordinates. Rhode Island is buying updated maps but
so far has only been able to afford them for about a fifth of its communities.

In Florida's Lee County, 911 employees themselves have been updating local
street maps. Every workday, a lone employee armed with a GPS receiver
drives a few of the county's thousands of miles of roads, stopping at each
intersection to record the exact coordinates. After eight years, the project is
about half finished.

Still, Rhode Island rescued several boaters when their cellphones revealed
their coordinates--the Coast Guard is one emergency responder that does
speak latitude and longitude. And in Lee County, the new capability has at
least cut back on crank calls from teenagers, says Rausch, the 911
operator. Kids often call from cellphones, she says, thinking it's funny to say
they need an ambulance for something like a paper cut. So Rausch now
asks them to stay on the line while she gets their position. "They quickly
hang up, and I suspect don't call anymore," she says with a smile.

"Not many people realize that we know where their cellphone is."

An ID Card That You Can Never Lose

Pets have them; soon products will too. So why not radio tags for people? A
Florida-based company called Applied Digital Solutions is injecting a
rice-grain-size ID chip under the skin of a few willing pioneers, including a
Florida family dubbed the "Chipsons." Acquaintances raised their eyebrows,
says mom Leslie Jacobs, 47. "But people thought pacemakers were weird at
first."

Jacobs's husband had cancer, and the family initially wanted to implant his
medical data--then decided to give chips to Mom and son Derek as well. The
FDA has not yet approved that use of the device, but scores of other people
have had the chips implanted for identity purposes, say company officials.
The chips can be read only from within a few feet, and scanners are rare,
making it unlikely that one will be handy when needed. But company head
Scott Silverman says that was also true for a system widely used for pets
and livestock; the scanners are now common in vet clinics, he says.

Privacy experts, however, are spooked by the idea that people's personal
data could be scanned without their knowledge. They're even less
comfortable with another Applied Digital Solutions implant, still a prototype,
that would include a global positioning system chip and could be tracked
remotely. -David Lagesse

 Link to article in U.S. News & World
Report:http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030908/tech/8bigbro.htm