GPS trackers - a potential weapon from hell

Not on a regular basis, but I was tracked late one night by a Volusia County Sheriff's copter once. It followed me for about 20 miles, till I arrived at the WACX TV transmitter site where I had to do the weekly transmitter maintainence. I had done nothing for them to follow me, and I knew that they didn't have the guts to follow me too close to the tower and all that Phillistand fiber guy lines. It would have been very difficult to land inside the fences in the daytime. It would have been suicide at night.

Why don't you read some real science and think for yourself? Its obvious that you're up to something, and the guilt over it is driving you insane.

This is the down side of a wiki. Any moron with internet access can post any worthless piece of shit, and then claim it to be a fact.

Those locked folders amy be inside information they don't want their competitors to see, but their engineers need access to while away from the lab. We had them at the telemetry place I worked. The files were only available to the design group involved in a project.

Except in the movie, "Firewall" ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Actually, I believe OUR COLLECTIVE CONCLUSION here at sci.electronics.design and also the conclusion of everyone else at Wikipedia (except yourself) is that you're paranoid. It is you, who have never worked with GPS electronics, who don't know what you're talking about.

SMS? GPRS? Give ma a break. If I were to design a covert tracking device I wouldn't use them. They are bulky, require a lot of CPU overhead and requires a monthly fee to the telephone company. A simple FM trasmitter is far smaller and uses far less power hence requires a far smaller battery.

I've worked, and still am working on lots of GPS systems and believe me it is easy to foil them. Just park in a basement tunnel and nobody can get a fix on you. For covert tracking purposes GPS in unreliable.

A more reliable system is the one used by the CIA: have a team of 3 people follow you around. It's very effective and if done properly is foolproof. Or the system used by the police: follow your car around in a helicopter and direct the cops on the ground to you.

There is a countermeasure against the CIA system: rollerblades/skates. They're too fast to be followed on foot yet can go to places where you can't be followed by car or motorcycle. If you're tracked by helicopter just enter a very large shopping mall. Large shopping complexes often have too many exits to monitor properly.

Yes, I've read the GPS wiki page. It's mostly fairy tale mixed with some real technologies. An effective GPS tracker cannot be hidden since it must have a clear view of the sky. A good example of one is the experimental system in trial in California where they shoot a GPS tracker coated in sticky chewing-gum like substance at your car. The thing is bloody obvious if you look at it. Long story short: if the GPS tracker is not visible on the outside of your car then it is not there. Note that hiding it in under the hood doesn't work because it is a Faraday's cage.

Bwahahahaha! Most lurker/posters don't even know the concept.

I was pulling TACAN signals out of the noise floor back in 1964, which is part of the source of my fuming about Hans' PLL claims.

...Jim Thompson

Minutes... AND they'll draw blood ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Not really. Consider the field strength of the satellite signals on the ground. You only need to keep your jamming signal say 6dB above that point, within a radius of a few meters. Nobody except perhaps the vehicle next to you will know. Exactly the same principle as the FM car-radio-adapter devices used for iPods and such; they are strong enough to override a local station within your vehicle, but are barely audible a few meters away.

It's also possible to locate the bug using a passive scanning device, because it is transmitting position data back home on some uplink frequency. (I think it's also possible to detect the GPS receiver itself using similar principles to the TV detector vans used in Britain). Once located, it can of course be removed and reattached to any convenient wild animal.

Or the movie, "Wedlock".

I dont think that would work that well with pets.

can be

Oh. *I* think that would work extremely well with the neighbours cat - muahahahaaa ;->

... But of course it would deprive the dog of her daily boost in andrenalin and pride in defending the garden from the black invaders ;-)

So spoketh news2020 before "they" go him ;-)

It's funny that some people think that they are so important that people-of-power will actually care where they go and what they do.

Agree!

Yeah, but in this case the target will maintain the tracking device. The mobile network will track the handset quite adequately but since it was not designed for tracking it is hard to get the data out. The network does a decent job of keeping local information local so every little change does not spam the entire network.

It can be done and it has been used by police in Denmark as part of the evidence.

But that would ruin your drug deals.

Only when used alone. Evidence compounds, so more "channels" are needed.

If the "intelligence services" are after you, you never seem them unless they want to send a message!.

They use more than three people and they can drive mountain bikes, rollerblades and skateboards too. They are good, they blend in and they even rotate the people so you do not see the same person in very different places. When you follow the daily routine, you see the same people at the same time, no?

f.ex. I saw a drug bust just next to where I parked the car:

The policeman was tattoed all over his upper body, he had piercings, long nails ingrained with dirt, wore an old leather jacket, black jeans and basketball shoes kept together with dirty gaffa-tape. Exactly the kind of low-life semi-psychotic look one would expect from someone openly buying a kg of meths in a public parking cellar. The only thing that gave him away was the professional way he slapped the handcuffs on the dealer when the dealer handed over the drugs and the badge. Nobody would have made that guy.

They will simply break into your car and place it in the upholstry with abundant power from the cars battery; they are good with cars, you will not find it unless physically taking the car apart. Their device will probably just accumulate data and they collect it with a short-range link while you leave your car "the usual spot". They will use that to work out your daily routines - after all, there are only a few ways one can get around town - so they will know where to deploy the teams most effectively.

PS:

If "they" want to send a message, "they" are so blunt it is funny:

While working near a classified site in England I was followed home by a nice lady in an armoured Volvo - the whole thing with inch-thick window glass. Then there was a van parked across the road for a few nights that I phoned the Police about - this being in the time of the IRA - reply was "It's ok sir, we know about that vehicle". They even phoned and asked for details of an East-German collegue so I referred them to the German embassy, which should have the number of the German intelligence service in case they had lost the ability to look it up. Real cartoon stuff just saying that "we are watching - and we are booooored silly".

In my current incarnation, I design GPS tracking units with GSM/GPRS realtime reporting of location (amongst other things).

1. It's difficult enough to get a GPS lock with a clear view of the sky from inside a vehicle, even just under the dash, let alone under a vehicle, and that's with an active antenna (they have LNAs embedded in the antenna) and the latest GSP units.
2. Reporting requires GSM of some description, and if the OP is that paranoid, simply scan for the known GSM bands. Note GPRS is preferred over SMS for a number of practical reasons.
3. Jamming the GPS signal is so easy it's hilarious. I do it inadvertently with extra equipment running on the bench near the antenna.
4. Location tracking via GSM is somewhat imprecise - in the boonies, towers may be, and are, miles apart. Although you'll have an idea of where the GSM unit is, precise location out there is harder to do.

So calm your paranioa :)

Cheers

PeteS

Michael A. Terrell schrieb:

Another internet dyslexic. I mentioned it here, I mentioned it there, but somehow it always escapes your reduced attention capability. This time, I'll install a separate chapter here and only for you, just to make sure you don't miss the point again, if this is alright for you?:

The folder quoted is called BOS. That is the german acronym for 'beh=F6rden f=FCr ordnung und sicherheit', or something like 'authorities for (public) order and safety'. I allowed myself to set an equation mark and compare that to your LEC.

Again: Would that arrangement ring a bell with you? Apprarently not. 'Been there, done that'? Not quite, I'm afraid.

--

Unter blinden ist der ein=E4ugige k=F6nig.

What puzzled me when I designed one a couple of years ago, was that the position would often wander, anything up to a hundred metres, and usually about 4 in the morning. 15 minutes later, all was tickety-boo once more.

Like you can be sure that the message actually arrives within 24 hours.

A silly bug meant that mine, which was meant to re- send the message every hour if not acknowledged, sent it continuously after the first hour. Even at 5p a go, with 11 hoursworth of SMS messages every 30 seconds or so I was glad the customer was paying.

Paul Burke

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com schrieb:

Can you imagine that when I hear that paranoia/schizophrenia/persecution mania etc pp (you name it) stuff, then I only feel reaasured to be on the right track?

And the other thing: You gringos should have learnt from the history of technical developments by now that, if you yourself consider something technically unfeasible for you, then this doesn't necessarily mean it is unfeasible for others.

--

Unter blinden ist der ein=E4ugige k=F6nig.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com schrieb:

Sounds good. I had the same idea but am not able to put it into practice. Are you? So why don't you do it, become a rich man AND win a Nobel prize for protecting civil liberties?

--

Unter blinden ist der ein=E4ugige k=F6nig.

I did not say such things were not feasible - indeed, my designs do precisely what the OP article is apparently worried about (our largest customers are truck fleeets who *want* the devices).

My point is that the systems can be disabled by non-intrusive technical measures quite simply, although not necessarily cheaply.

If you want to make sure GPS does not operate in a vehicle, it's pretty simple to do if you know *what* to do.

Tracked by GPRS/SMS? That can be dealt with too, with now commercially available equipment (Cell phone jammers may be nominally illegal, but since when did that stop people buying and using anything?)

Cheers

PeteS

level... right?

What does that mean? That statement is meaningless unless you specify a bandwidth and integration time.

Any signal can be pulled out of the noise if you auto-correlate and use a narrow-enough bandwidth. But to get useful GPS info, you need a wide bandwidth to get accurate time of arrival info. So there's an inherent tradeoff between GPS accuracy and sensitivity.

The wander has got a lot better with SA turned off, but at times can give some very silly results. I have on a track-logging program, recorded over Mach 1,in a Land Rover, and over 150mph, on a bicycle.... I did a similar system a few years ago, which was used so that supermarkets could be 'alerted' when a delivery truck was a certain distance from them. A bit of careful software tweaking to remove 'exceptional' jumps, and some ingenious damping algorithms on the motion, gave results with a modern receiver that were fine, except in a few areas with a lot of tall buildings, where the small area of actual 'sky' area being seen, combined with reflections of signals off the buildings, made accuracy appalling. Adding a 'distance travelled' input from the ABS sensors on the truck, and using this to reject silly readings, made the final result OK.

Best Wishes