Beijing To Track Citizen's Cell Phones 120
wan9xu writes "Purportedly to help alleviate Beijing's traffic congestion, the new initiative, literally translated as 'Platform for Citizen Movement Information,' proposes to track individual citizens' movement in real time via cell phone signals. Cell phones will be automatically registered at cell towers as soon as they are switched on. The rest is just like the phone tracking you see every week on CSI."
Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Cell phones will be automatically registered at cell towers as soon as they are switched on." ... err, as they usually do? Since otherwise, how would the cell company know how to route a call for you?
Of course TFA is in Chinese, and I don't know what it really says, but yeah, the very design of the cell network allows for such tracking, and there's a lot of potential for abuse there, whichever government does it.
I guess this is in response to the Arab protests, if you as the authority can see where people are gathered/gathering, you know where to send the skull-crackers to.
Oh, and logging individuals would make it easier to see which people (phones) show up at these things regularly, for whatever reason, so we can crack their skulls too!
I wonder what sort of techniques can be used to fight this; multiple phones (useless since afaik you need an ID card to get a SIM card), leave your phone at home, go to "airplane mode" at a random time before the planned demo? Should the protesters buy walkie-talkies and tune to xy frequency? (The police would then just skull-crack anyone caught with a walkie-talkie).