And you know without a doubt they would stop pinging when you took the batteries out? What if the phones had capacitors inside of them that would hold enough power for them to ping for two more hours?
I'm the bad guy here (in our theorizing). I don't think I would guess that there was a capacitor inside that would keep the phones pinging for up to 2 hours, unless I had technical experience or I planned this out in advance. But, maybe yllek the WSer isn't as savvy as "the bad guy"! Whether I thought about that or not, I think I'd play it safe and quickly submerge the batteries in water, burn them or hammer them to bits - as close as possible to where I found them.
Here's what I assume most people who have watched crime shows or have committed crimes would know about cell phones:
1. If you turn the power off, they're still pinging until the battery dies.
2. If you take the battery out, the phone itself has no power and will stop pinging.
3. The location of a powered phone (dumped or in someone's posession at the time) can be determined from records of the service provider. If the powered phone was in an area that is fairly populated with cell phone towers, pings off of different towers (triangulation) can determine the location down to a pretty small area. If cell towers are far and few between, the phone wouldn't have been pinging off of different towers so it may be a much broader potential location.
This is just my novice understanding from following cases and watching true crime shows. One or more points could be wrong and I love to learn more about this stuff; cell phone pings are becoming quite a valuable tool for LE.
In regards to your question about getting rid of the phones when the service provider has records, I assume a lot of people know that dumping the hardware (phone itself) doesn't prevent LE from accessing the call logs that show the incoming phone/text number, outgoing phone/text numbers, durations, etc (and for texts, I understand the service provider can pull the actual message content if the records have not yet been erased). But, I don't know if my assumption would be correct. Maybe lots of people would think that tossing the hardware/phone is the same as destroying the phone activity records? Or, they aren't aware that text messages can sometimes be retrieved from the cell provider. I don't know whether cell phone pictures can be seen by the service provider; I assume most people wouldn't know that for sure.
I'm thinking whoever took the phones, was ignorant about service provider records altogether. Or, in contrast, they are smarter than I and knew for sure that incriminating text or pic contents could only be viewed from the phone itself.
And now, my head hurts!
hone::crazy: