Trope: Police have to keep bad guy talking on the phone long enough to trace them and find their location. Professional bad guys hang up right before it triangulates their coordinates.
Apparently, Hollywood’s been getting this inspiration from a pre-digital age when they use this trope in movies. See link for more info. It’s just funny that most of the “tracing the call” scenes I’ve seen are definitely after the 2000’s.
Another link: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/10/how-hard-would-it-be-to-trace-the-sniper-s-phone-calls.html
A fun gif: https://i.gifer.com/9QtC.mp4
Almost all copper wire phone lines are gone.
Almost all calls are routed via the internet these days, which makes them trivial to track. This was the “metadata” scandal during the Bush admin where they said they were only spying on people’s metadata. But metadata is enough to see that someone made a single, hour-long call to a suicide prevention hotline, and that’s enough to make some likely valid assumptions of what happened during that call.
The NSA has been sucking down the entire internet into their Utah datacenter since late 2013, over 10 years ago.
When the MAGAs went to the Capitol on Jan 6th 2021 I was actually shocked they weren’t rounded up more quickly because cell phones have an IMEI identifier as well as a MAC address , both of which get logged on the cell towers they connect to. It should have been trivial to connect devices to device-owners and be able to track where the devices went after they left the Capitol.
Stingrays, fake cell towers that allow police to surveil all connections made to their Stingray, have been around since 2001.
Hell, hacker Kevin Mitnick was caught using simple cellular tower triangulation back in 1995.
I think they didn’t round up the insurrectionists because the executive branch was supportive of the insurrection. Once Congress and others put pressure on the executive branch, they started slowly working on getting them. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a closed-doors negotiated deal. Trump goes free at the impeachment, but the insurrectionists have to be prosecuted and not pardoned.
If the executive branch wasn’t supportive of the insurrection, the whole thing would have lasted less than a minute and been a pile of dead bodies. There’s no way a ragtag group of populist dipshits would have been able to compromise the US Capitol otherwise.
The truly political move from the legislator would be to let them storm the capital. If you kill them all, then that makes you look bad. You let them do it, and it makes Trump an insurrectionist.
The issue was more that they needed to identify only the ones that illegally entered the premises, and separate those from people legitimately working there. They then had to cross reference those IMEI/MACs to camera footage of them illegally entering the building. Some of those dipshits were ID’d and picked up immediately, others used burners and covered their faces with masks (ironically) and had to be tracked similarly to how Luigi was caught; establishing a timeline of events with that same individual using other cameras in the area until you find one of them without a mask on.
WhatsApp also collects this “metadata”, only the content is end to end encrypted
well of course. how else would they route the content. the only other way is route all messages to everyone and only the real recipient can decode it. that would be a data nightmare.
As a safe bet: Almost everything “advanced tech” on tv is unrealistic.
The tech is there to drive a fictional narrative. Not to document the historical setting. Things only need to resemble reality. Inspiration from old tech helps this realistic feeling.
I also assume there might be laws that restrict the details movie makers can show in context of law enforcement operations and government spying.
Enhance!
When was the last time Hollywood used that trope?
Scream VI made a full plot hole with it.
Will Trent just used it I think.
I never even heard of that show until now.
It has been pretty good. Almost like Monk, House, and Fargo as a police show.
At least 20 years as far as I remember
Everyone has a GPS on their phone anyway I’d imagine they just use that lol.
They don’t even need gps. They can just track you by the cell towers your phone automatically connects to.
I work in 911 dispatch, so I have some relevant knowledge here
Cell tower triangulation is our bread and butter for locating a cell phone. It also kind of sucks.
With triangulation we get a set of latitude/longitude coordinates, a “confidence factor” which is a radius in meters around that point that basically shows you the potential error, and a “confidence percentage” which is how confident the cell provider is in that information (it’s 90% I’ve literally never seen it be any number other than 90%)
The confidence factor depends on a few different things- geography, how many cell towers the phone is able to connect to, if you’re inside/outside, etc.
The policy where I work is if it’s within 300 meters we can enter the call as normal and send cops, fire, EMS, or whoever out to look for the emergency if we get no other location info from the caller. More than 300m and it’s usually getting bumped down to an information call, cops will still go to check it out but even 300m is a pretty big area to have them check and can include potentially hundreds of houses, apartments, businesses, etc.
Usually we can get that 300m accuracy, but not always by a longshot, I sometimes see them in the thousands of meters which is basically useless. It also takes about 20-30 seconds to refresh so it’s not a live location, and if they’re, for example, in a moving vehicle, they can be a pretty significant distance away in 30 seconds, let alone in the several minutes it takes responders to arrive.
And once we’re off the call, we don’t get any further location updates. If we want to ping the phone again, that involves calling the phone company and faxing them paperwork or something like that (it’s handled by our supervisor so I’m not directly involved in that part of the process) I think it normally ends up taking like 10 or 20 minutes for us to get a ping that way, and then it’s only 1 ping at a time and they’re going to be spaced out about that far or further.
Handset gps based location is generally more accurate (although occasionally it does happen that it’s less accurate than the triangulation) but we don’t necessarily get it on every call, it’s still kind of a hacked-together system at a lot of dispatch centers and it doesn’t always integrate well with the other software. It does update much faster, and we usually continue to get updated locations from it for maybe a couple minutes after we hang up.
We don’t really have any way that I’m aware of to request a gps based ping on a phone we’re not on the line with.
I’m sure the feds have some back doors and extra tools at their disposal that we don’t have at a county 911 center, I really can’t speak to that. I doubt they’re able to get a much more accurate triangulation ping than we are, that seems like a pretty hard limitation of the technology to me.
calling the phone company and faxing them paperwork
doing WHAT the fuck now?!?
on a more serious note, can you elaborate on the thing where you, a call receiver, have access to the GPS on the caller’s phone? like, how?asked and answered, still don’t understand how that happens.I wonder how they get GPS info through a call, hmm.
It goes through your phone’s data connection. That’s part of the reason we don’t get GPS info on all calls, no data, no gps. If you call from a deactivated cell phone that can only call 911 for example, since you don’t have data we don’t get that gps data(or your emergency contact or medical info if you’ve filled that out on your phone)
That’s really cool. Thank you so much for sharing!
They don’t even need that! They can triangulate from Bluetooth and wifi radios as well.
They don’t even need that anymore either, ‘cause they can just use the chips and magnetofluids they’ve injected into everyone via vaccines. So outdated.
Well, i mean… Duh
I know for sure that cops can use cell towers. Are there any examples of using Bluetooth and wifi?
I believe you. Im just curious.
I’ve heard of a technique to track specific vehicles based on the tire pressure monitoring system in newer cars that use Bluetooth. I kinds of assume anything wireless that broadcasts a unique ID can be tracked somehow.
It is how phones without GPS hardware get your location for things like Maps and whatnot. If you’ve ever had it ask you to turn BT on for better accuracy, that’s why; it just opens up more connection points to triangulate position.
And, just triangulation itself works by doing math on the signal range between a minimum of 3 points of connectivity. It could be done with any wireless communication system.
Interesting. I’ve never been able to get any map app to know my location without cell data and turning Location on.
I recently worked with this data and it’s actually really rough. Different standards for cell tower IDs, overlaps and same tower different tech (4G/5G/NBIoT etc)
Government’s would have better access but fit commercial use is not fun (for tracking your own SIMs, not other people’s)
“This means trace the call Ronda!” “Look at the extension.”
btw, on old POTS lines, your call is connected way way before anyone ever picks up. The audio can be recorded basically the instant the number is dialed. We used to do this at an old customer service training facility.
We’d hear people beating their wives in the background, screaming at their kids, etc. It was bad.
