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If I understand your question correctly: the phone numbers of the shadow phones are known, and the numbers that they called are known also (thus Fort Meade). But the phones were card phones, with no identities attached to them.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake
by talos (mihalis at gmail dot com) on Fri Jul 6th, 2007 at 06:17:24 AM EST
[ Parent ]
D'oh, I remember that about Fort Meade! But this track is completely lacking in the IEEE article.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
by DoDo on Fri Jul 6th, 2007 at 06:26:16 AM EST
[ Parent ]
We decided to focus on the technical side and ignore the whodoneit angle.  I don't think as outsider scientists we could contribute any ideas or substance that were not already known.
by dds (dds at aueb dot gr) on Sun Jul 8th, 2007 at 02:51:09 PM EST
[ Parent ]
On the technical side I searched where I've seen AXE mentionned and found it, it's in the history of the (very interesting) Erlang language way through Ericsson:

http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Armstrong/bits.ps

The last slide is an amusing historical reference for geeks :)

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jul 8th, 2007 at 03:27:04 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Even without identity, you can trace the shadow phone physical location and movements (if any) like for any cell phone.

I don't know if that lead was explored, the article sidebar hints at it:


[...]
Another popular theory posits that the U.S. National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, or some other U.S. spy agency did it. The location of the monitored phones correlates nicely with apartments and other property under the control of the U.S. Embassy in Athens.
[...]

If the shadow phones number in the hundred some things becomes really hard to hide. And conspiracy theory of having the real spy hiding all the shadow phones near USA property undiscovered for more than a year harder to believe.

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jul 8th, 2007 at 03:46:00 PM EST
[ Parent ]
The problem was that the perpetrators found out that their illegal phonetapping had been discovered (for example through an insider or when Vodafone removed their software from the exchange) and thus had a chance to switch off / throw away the shadow phones, before anybody could triangulate their location.  Thus, the only thing we know regarding their location are the base stations that these phones used.
by dds (dds at aueb dot gr) on Sun Jul 8th, 2007 at 05:02:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]
With 100 phones that should give an idea :)
by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jul 8th, 2007 at 05:24:09 PM EST
[ Parent ]
There were only 14-16 shadow phones.  The wiretapped phones were about 100, but it is not those that an investigator would wish to locate.
by dds (dds at aueb dot gr) on Mon Jul 9th, 2007 at 03:58:35 AM EST
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