FYI - RE WEEEKEND EVENTS OUT HERE

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Subject: THE GREAT FREEWAY CHASE & LAW ENFORCEMENT
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 94 20:46:58 PDT
From: "Willis H. Ware" <willis () conrad rand org>


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Folder: YES
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RE: the weekend's events.


You probably watched the nationwide TV coverage of the O.J.Simpson
freeway chase.  The Sunday LATimes had a collateral article titled
"Fugitive relied on and was undone by cellular phone."  Of special
relevance to many current interests are some comments about tapping
and tracking a cellfone.  Salient points are:


        0.  Simpson had apparently made several calls from his cell
phone and had also been contacted several times on it by law
enforcement.


        1.  Cell company involved was AirTouch Cellular which is the
new name for PacTel's recently spun-off cell business.


        2.  The reporter had obviously interviewed a Michael Guidry, of
the Guidry Group, Houston, TX, security consultants.  It isn't
completely clear what things originated from him.


        3.  The company said that "law enforcement had subpoenaed the
company to help".  The surrounding context would suggest that it was
LAPD but the affair at the time was in Orange County so it may have
been the OC Sheriff.  Throughout everything I read today in two
papers, there was NO mention of FBI, only of local and county
authorities.


        4. " Monitoring would have made Simpson's capture inevitable as
long as he continued to use the phone ... technicians at a [cellular
control] station began monitoring calls made by and to the car phone of
the Ford Bronco [containing Simpson and Cawlings]...." "..cellular
tracking is extremely beneficial, it's an investigative tool of the
future [says Guidry]..."


        5. "Within a cell site, LE officers ... use triangulation
equipment to zero in on a particular caller [Guidry said] ..."


        6. "Eavesdropping on cellular phone calls is illegal without a
wiretap warrant, even for AirTouch as it scans for cellular fraud....
In Simpson's case, LAPD got a court order allowing them to track down
the fugitive ..."


        7. "If [Simpson] had used his phone in an apartment, " Guidry
said, "officers with triangulation equipment could have pinpointed his
call ..."


It appears that the idea of triangulation came from the consultant.
Maybe it's for real, maybe it's an extrapolation of well known
direction finding techniques from the military and other fields.  We
all know how triangulation works but it would take some pretty modern
equipment to DF a moving target whose linear velocity was limited to
50MPH or less, but whose change of angular position relative to the DF
site could have been large.


        8.  The LAPD obviously had a very compliant judge to get a
fast wiretap warrant, OR they did the paperwork after the fact.


        9.  AirTouch apparently does some kind of security scanning to
look for fraud although it does not eavesdrop.  I suppose it looks
for IDs of fones that are reported stolen or perhaps for duplicate
IDs.  It was evidently this equipment that allowed the control station
to monitor the Bronco.


While the facts are far from complete, the evident success and ability
to track a cell fone is in sharp contrast to the impression that the
FBI has conveyed around Washington, apropos of its digital telephony
proposals.


If you want to look up the whole article which is about 24 column
inches, it's page A11 Sunday 6/19 LATimes, home delivered edition;
writer is Dean Takahashi.


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