neon_waterfall
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- Sep 23, 2014
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Someone in SAR explained the pinging to me briefly though I am sure there are others here with much greater information. But, effectively, the pings jump from cell tower to cell tower, so they can see where your phone was relative to any number of towers (time stamped or not, I don't know, but it sounds like it). The farther apart the towers (like out in the country, where we don't get cell reception at our houses!), the more inaccurate the pings in terms of coordinates. So instead of being accurate to, say, 100 yards, it's accurate to, perhaps, 1000 yards.
How LE gets that information, and in what format (graphical, GIS, text data) I have no idea.
Your cell phone's location is calculated by your distance from nearby cell towers.
Your phone will "ping" available towers at a regular intervals - this is little more than a "handshake" where both the cell and the tower confirm they received the message.
If you're 200 yards from tower A, 750 yards from tower B, 500 yards from tower C, then you must be at x degrees north and y degrees west - assuming that all "pings" were sent at the same time and relative reply latency is close to zero when taking the distance into account (the "Doppler Effect").
Obviously, the accuracy will depend on the speed at which the cell is moving - the greater ground speed, the less accuracy - and tower coverage; if the cell has more towers it can "see", the more accurate the triangulation.
Ever noticed your cell battery drain really quickly when you're in an area of poor reception? This is why. If the cell has to "scan" to triangulate its position because it can't see enough towers or they're distant, this can be a huge drain on the battery as it's constantly having to put more effort into "pinging".
Cell companies use your position to, essentially, route data to your cell the cheapest way possible. Of course, they keep records of this information for other purposes (marketing, originally) and, as this information can be very intrusive, they tend to need a warrant and some lead time (to run the reports) before they can hand over this data to law enforcement.
Surveillance programs are another ball of wax, of course - traditionally, they were targeted in "real-time", which meant the service provider was able to specifically track the cell(s) requested.
Coming back to this case, though: I personally believe that today's landowner and last week's webcam owner are legitimate due to how they carry themselves and by their "vagueness". Hoaxes tend to provide very specific and definitive "information" so the reader will believe them. Only LE will have enough information to determine whether the two leads match, hopefully they do.
One thing, though - and I hate to even say this - but if the cell phone in question was Hannah's, why didn't the suspect destroy it long before he even got to this location? And if the cell phone was his, that indicates a HUGE mistake on his part in ensuring it was elsewhere, switched off, with the battery removed and unable to give anyone any clues as to where he was.
The suspect has been linked to similar crimes - which indicates he's "experienced" at this ghastly stuff. It's a bit of a "rookie" mistake not to deal with the cell phones, which seems puzzling, as psychos like that tend to be obsessive about details.