Editing P2p mobile carriers (section)

= I know where you live =

Every mobile contains a unique hardware ID that enables tracking without the need for a SIM card [imei]. A powered phone is a tracked phone [vlr-update]. A powered phone with a SIM is a tracked subscriber [u/sim-mem]. Want to turn it off? You can’t. To receive calls the network needs to know the base station [hex-call] you connect from (which gets published to a database that is easy to access.) [ss7-tracking][any-time-interrogation][imsi-catcher][aka-tracking]

By now you may be thinking that its better to turn off your phone and be done with it, but modern mobile operating systems are free to specify what the “off” button does [typhoon-box]. So you may think that the phone is off when in reality it’s still in a sketchy standby mode that’s periodically firing up the baseband processor to update its location.

What is a baseband processor, you ask? It is a highly restricted chip that handles almost all interactions with the phone system, and only a handful of companies get to know its full capabilities. While the baseband processor is largely a black box, there are some things we know about them and they’re quite scary.

The chip contains code that allows an operator to manipulate the SIM card, for example, installing applications to the SIM that will persist even after the phone has been formatted [remote-uicc][adpu]. It also allows the police and emergency services to retrieve the exact location via GPS [emergency-location][lawful-interception]. The only conclusion to draw from this is the baseband processor and related SIM card are back doors. Or more precisely, they are implementations of '''standardised back doors''', since what I just described is all part of the mobile protocol suite.

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