Anonymity of prepaid phone chip-cards
ken
bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk
Mon Mar 29 07:01:06 PST 2004
Thomas Shaddack wrote:
[...]
> Suggested countermeasure: When true anonymity is requested, use the card
> ONLY ONCE, then destroy it. Makes the calls rather expensive, but less
> risky. Make sure you can't be traced back by other means, ranging from
> surveillance cameras in the vicinity of the phone booths to the location
> data from cellphones (because, as it's well-known but often overlooked,
> the cellphone networks know the location of every active phone).
In local pubs round where I live it is not at all uncommon to find
people buying & selling SIM cards, swapping them, or just handing
roudn to friends & family members.
If these persons are involved in activities which would be
disapproved of by the law, I imagine that they would be very
unlikley to be anything that could be called terrorism. More
likely doing casual work without paying tax, using drugs
deprecated by governments, trading in unauthorised DVDs, perhaps
employing illegal immigrants. (Allegedly that is - as far as I am
aware the apparently oriental gentleman who walks round pubs and
clubs late at night offering DVDs and CDs for a pound is in full
complience with all local copyright laws)
There was a notorious murder locally (Damilola Taylor) which the
police took a logn time to charge anywone for. When they finally
got round to it, some of the evidence turned on mobile phone
records. One piece could not be used, because the court was
satisfied that the family and friends of the accused persons
swapped and shared phones so frequently that there was no way to
connect the use of a phone with an individual.
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