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How Can Your Phone Be Tracked?

Most of us are aware that our phones contain a GPS (Global Positioning System) chips, but how much can they really track our phones?

The NSA assembled a team called Geolocation Cell or Geo Cell, with analysts and technicians from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency with the intent of tracking people geographically in real time.

Geo Cell communicates with the CIA and US military around the world, the motto “We Track ’Em, You Whack ’Em.” quickly caught on at Geo Cell as they tracked the cell phones of al-Qaeda and other ‘terror suspects’ around the world.

Joint Special Operations Command(JSOC) called the technology “The Find” and it is reported that the technology developed could track phones even when they were turned off. This is probably due to “feature phones” that may not fully turn off.

For example, Graham said many old “feature phones,” even when they were switched off, would have a baseband processor power up every 10 minutes or so to retrieve SMS messages, but not phone calls. “The moral of this is that just because you define the phone as ‘off’ doesn’t mean that it’s 100% completely ‘off’ all the time,” he said. - Is That Phone Really Off? – InformationWeek

The simplest way tracking is done is by remotely installing a hidden app(application) on the phone which transmits the devices GPS location over the internet or even by SMS text messaging, all without the user knowing. The FBI used a similar technique called a “roving bug”, remotely turning on the microphones to listen in on people. There are publicly available apps like this for tracking your children or in case you lose your phone, or it gets stolen.

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