The linked article talks of "forcing" carriers into this.

The "trueposition.com" web site makes it clear that they ship their hardware ("TruePosition Location Measurement Units") ostensibly for 9-1-1-from-mobile purposes.

For that reason (and others) it seems to me extremely likely that carriers don't need to be forced to support mass tracking at all. It's already there or easily slipped in. (The TruePosition platform does not rely exclusively on the Location Measurement Units.)

Heh.... This merits looking into:

http://www.trueposition.com/web/guest/press-releases?p_p_id=...

Here (about that):

http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/23/iphone-congress-mobile-tech...

I updated and expanded my article based on your feedback, and removed the wording 'forced'. Thanks very much.

A peer-to-peer towerless mesh network ( e.g. Terranet http://www.terranet.se/ ) could solve this problem.

Yes, perhaps free, community-operated p2p wifi networks could replace the monolithic paid cellular networks. It might take a long time before this would happen though.

There's also this thing called OpenBTS, but a search for it only lists about 17.000 results http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=openbts&#...

Why not eliminate the possibility of something pretending to be a base station to a number of nodes in the immediate area? With a mesh network, a takeover of an area by a single device may be less likely. Still, there would be a chance of one or more of the nodes causing mischief, and if multiple nodes in an area are compromised that could certainly be an even greater issue. So, direct point-to-point communication is still more preferable.

A couple examples of how such a universal surveillance system might be used:

big brother could identify the people who meet with known peace activists or political rivals, find their meeting places, and disrupt meetings or capture participants. They could track a target user until he might travel to a less populated area, then dispatch someone or something to capture or kill him.

Or you could just leave your cell phone at home when you're going on clandestine missions.

I made a shorter url for this post: http://sam.ai.ki/mofo