House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security – Hearing on the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act – Statement for the Record of Professor Matt Blaze, May 17, 2012
Re – Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act, S. 1212: “GPS is only one technology for cell location, and while it is the most visible to the end user, GPS is neither the most pervasive nor the most generally applicable cellular phone location system, especially in the surveillance context. More ubiquitously available are techniques that (unlike GPS) do not depend on satellites or special hardware in the handset, but rather on radio signal data collected and analyzed at the cellular providers’ towers and base stations. These network-based location techniques can give the position of virtually every handset active in the network at any time, regardless of whether the mobile devices are equipped with GPS chips and without the explicit knowledge or active cooperation of the phone users.”
