Weekend Potpourri — Things That Didn’t Fit Elsewhere
Sometimes I don’t even publish anything on a weekend, but I’m trying to clean the in box up for next week and I came across a couple notes I have made that should be responded to right now. So in the interest of the “clean desk” policy….
GPS Combat Training: The Strategy Page has a great write-up on how simple, aircraft-mounted pods which include GPS and other sensors can be used as a near substitute for the effective but horribly expensive electronic training ranges that the USAF and some others use for pilot combat and weapons training. A good read and a decent job of explaining the issues.
Reverse Tracking: I get quite a few searches here centered around the question “Can a GPS be “reverse tracked”? Well, the answer is without hesitation yes, no, or maybe.
On The “Yes” side: I‘m assuming the folks asking these questions mean “reverse tracking” in the sense of looking into the GPS device and being able to tell where it has been in the past. The ‘yes” would certainly apply there almost all of the time. from expensive world-wide airborne tracking systems to cheap little consumer-grade handheld you buy at Wal*Mart there is almost always a memory function that stores some number of prior GPS “fixes” that were calculated by the device. A person who by legal or surreptitious means got physical access to a GPS device would likely be able to get some past history information from it. In fact, my advice on the commercial side is, always take this into account as part of your specification/purchase decision matrix. You likely do not want a system that doesn’t keep some historical data, you don’t want to lose the information from yesterday’s deliveries by one careless keystroke or a lost floppy or CD-ROM. On the other side of that coin, if you operate assets clandestinely … say unmarked police surveillance then you want to know how to assure yourself this information isn’t available to unauthorized folks who might want it.
Now I may be misinterpreting the query here. If the question really meant to say, “Can I track a person who is using GPS live, just by virtue of the fact they have a GPS”? That’s where either the “no” or “maybe” come in to play.
On The “No” side: If a person has a standard GPS receiver that calculates position and display it to the user there is no practical way that person can be “reverse tracked”. The GPS receiver dos not emit any signal or give out it’s position that anyone not in view of that device could detect.
On The “Maybe: side: Cell phones, with or without GPS can always be tracked whenever they are turned on and in range of a cellular phone carrier. The only difference between GPS and non-GPS tracking capabilities is that the multilateration techniques used for non-GPS phones may give less accuracy but it is absolutely safe to assume that your cell phone can be tracked … live, in near-real time, with or without GPS. In a majority of US jurisdictions law enforcement and the phone companies themselves do not need a court order to do this either … if they are not listening to conversations on the phone the wiretap laws don’t come into effect and if there is even the most remote suspicion by someone that you may be a terrorist not only can law enforcement monitor you at will but US law prohibits tem from ever revealing this to you. “If I tell you, I’d have to kill you”.
If you are thinking about a non-cellular commercial GPS tracking device, such as a taxicab system, school bus monitor, commercial freight hauler QualComm, etc. then the answer is, since the device somehow gets information on position back to a central location is is always possible that the information could be intercepted. The “maybes” come into effect by considerations like the type of transmission media, the degree of encryption used for the transmission, the level of certification awarded the system by government agencies and so on. Some systems run “wide open” and are thus available for anyone technically inclined to “reverse track”, others are protected up to the level of protection afforded the highest level of government secrets and so are essentially untraceable. As with all electronic systems questions, YMMV.