cellphone use. Dr. Farber, I thought the following may be of interest to IP readers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------- Today's US news sources show several reports on Italian prosecutors writing arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents in the kidnapping of a Muslim preacher in Milan in 2003. The Italian newspapers, however, provide some interesting technical details on the investigation, which hinged on tracking their cellphones. Excerpt translations follow. [Repubblica, 6/24/2005] Milan closes the inquiry - CIA, 12 agents face arrest. [...] "The CIA team bungled a lot, leaving clues everywhere. A group of cell phones is in Via Guerzoni [where the kidnapping occurred] around noon. The same cell phones moved toward Aviano Air Base shortly thereafter. Calls from those cell phone were made to the U.S. consulate and to numbers in Virginia. One of the same cell phones was located in Cairo the day after. From the cell phones [the investigators] tracked [...] the hotels in Milan where the team members stayed and the car rental agency where the van used in the operation was rented. [...] In those days of February 2003 the American team in Milan showed a surprising ignorance, or lack of care at least, in the use of their cellphones. Using the words of one of our sources, "they showed to know less than one of our homegrown thieves". Apparently they thought that replacing the phones' SIM cards was enough to prevent successful tracking. Not so, the Americans apparently ignored the unique hardware identifier of each GSM phone (the IMEI), which can be tracked regardless of the SIM card and the phone carrier. [Corriere della Sera, 6/24] Milan' prosecutors: jail the CIA agents. [Lots of details on the investigation results, including $120,000 of U.S. taxpayer's money spent by CIA team members to reside in 5 luxury hotels, plus a note about two couples of team members that took a vacation in "romantic hotels" in Valmalenco and along the Poet's Gulf after the kidnapping. The interesting bit involving cellphones is toward the end:] All the cellphones were irregular, since the registered owners were fake names, non-existing corporations and even innocent Milan women and a Rumenian bricklayer. However, the CIA operatives showed their own U.S. passports to register themselves in a total of 23 hotels and 4 rental car companies, and the phones could be placed in the same locations at the same times. The police tracked the photocopies of the passports, and determined that they were genuine documents, even though probably using showing cover names. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]