Cellphones can be traced by authorities monitoring its digital fingerprint and it's undetectable

Tech-savvy criminals try to evade being tracked by changing their cellphone's built-in ID code and by regularly dumping SIM cards. But engineers in Germany have discovered that the radio signal from every cellphone handset hides within it an unalterable digital fingerprint – potentially giving law enforcers a simple way of tracking the handset itself.

Developed by Jakob Hasse and colleagues at the Technical University of Dresden the tracking method exploits the tiny variations in the quality of the various electronic components inside a phone.

"The radio hardware in a cellphone consists of a collection of components like power amplifiers, oscillators and signal mixers that can all introduce radio signal inaccuracies," Hasse says. A phone's resistance, for instance, can vary between 0.1 and 20 per cent of its stated value depending on the quality of the component.
The upshot of these errors is that when analogue signals are converted into digital phone ones, the stream of data each phone broadcasts to the local mast contains error patterns that are unique to that phone's peculiar mix of components. In tests on 13 handsets in their lab, the Dresden team were able to identify the source handset with an accuracy of 97.6 per cent.
"Our method does not send anything to the mobile phones. It works completely passively and just listens to the ongoing transmissions of a mobile phone – it cannot be detected," Hasse says.Their research, funded by the EU and the German government, was performed on 2G phones. But "defects are present in every radio device, so it should also be possible to do this with 3G and 4G phones," Hasse says.
The novel method is welcome but technically demanding, say forensics specialists.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) uses hacker software to exploit vulnerabilities in cell phones that allow them to listen in on American citizen’s conversations to track criminals and terrorists.

By inserting spyware into suspect’s computers through emails and web links, government spooks are able to monitor their movements online.

Surveillance agencies blame their use of such tactics on suspects going dark by employing encrypted coding and new digital communications technology to evade detection.

By using already known vulnerabilities in software on computers and phones, agents can install their own programs to ensure stability and that their surveillance operations remain undetected.

As part of the scheme, the FBI employs hackers to create this specialized software; as well as private tech corporations that have recently sold such software to law enforcement agencies on the state and local level.

This leaves millions and millions of Americans at the mercy of agencies that seek to illegally spy on them.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23973-any-cellphone-can-be-traced-by-its-digital-fingerprint.html#.UgEEHpTD-Un
http://www.occupycorporatism.com/how-gov-spooks-listen-to-cell-phone-conversations-monitor-you-online/

Your cell phone’s location isn’t protected by the Fourth Amendment:
In a major decision last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the location of your cell phone when you place a call is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, which guards against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Whenever you make a cell-phone call, your phone provider knows where you are—it needs that information in order to find your device and complete the call. Phone companies generally keep records of users’ locations when calls are connected and disconnected. These logs, which store data about which cellular sites phones connect to, are known as historical cell-site records. Since most people keep their cell phones with them, a record of a phone’s location generally provides a good lead on its owner’s location as well. If the Feds want to know where you were last Tuesday at 9 P.M., for example, they can get a pretty good idea by finding out where your phone was.

The important legal question is how much protection these records receive when the government wants to make providers turn them over. In other words, what kind of evidence should the government be required to present in order to get your location records from a cell-phone company?
Legal protections generally come in two forms: statutory protections enacted by Congress and constitutional protections recognized by the courts. Congress has protected historical cell-site records with an intermediate threshold sometimes called reasonable suspicion. That’s the same standard it must meet to justify stopping and frisking someone for suspicious activity. Under Congress’s law, the government generally needs to go to a federal judge with reasonable grounds for suspecting that the records reveal a crime in order to access them.

If the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures protected cell-site records, the government would be required to satisfy a higher legal standard known as probable cause in order to obtain the records—the level of certainty required to arrest someone or to search their home for evidence. And unlike privacy protections enacted by Congress, constitutional protections can’t be taken away by a future legislature.

But in the new decision, the Fifth Circuit held that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to historical cell-site information; statutory protections are their only shield. If you want more privacy, the court suggested, your best options are to call your Congressman or to ask your phone company to enact a new policy to delete or anonymize its records.

The heart of the court’s reasoning is that there’s a difference between communicating with the phone company to set up a call and communicating through the company during the conversation that follows. When you’re actually talking on the phone, the content of the call belongs to you and the person you’re talking to—and the phone company can’t listen in. If the government wants to tap the line, the Fourth Amendment applies and the government needs a warrant.

But when you place a call, you need the phone company to route and direct the call over its network, and to do that, your cell phone needs to communicate with the phone company and disclose its location. That, the court reasoned, is communication between you and the company. And the record of whatever information your phone sent to the company belongs to the company, not to you. If it wants to keep that record for business purposes, it can. And if the government wants that record from the phone company, that’s an issue between the two of them—not an issue between the phone company and you.

The appeals court’s reasoning follows the 1979 Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Maryland, which found no Fourth Amendment protection in the numbers dialed to place a call. According to that case, when you dial a phone, you’re communicating to the phone company just like people communicated with a human operator before phones had dials. The court ruled that while new technology had automated the process, it made no substantive difference.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/08/why-your-cell-phones-location-isnt-protected-by-the-fourth-amendment.html

Verizon's "Law Enforcement Resource Team" (LERT) handbook:
Reveals how they handle requests from local, state, county and federal law enforcement nationwide.http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/verizon-spy.pdf