Missouri to Spy on Drivers Through Cell Phones

Headline News | October 8, 2005
By Denise Royal

Jefferson City, Missouri (AHN) -- The Missouri Department of Transportation will spend $3 million annually on a program to monitor the movements of individuals on highways via their cell phones -- without their knowledge or consent.

The technology doesn't use GPS, instead, it takes the signals that wireless phones send to towers and follows the movement of the phones from one tower to another.

That information is laid over highway maps to draw a grid of where phones are and how fast they're moving.

In what would be the largest project of its kind, the Missouri Department of Transportation is negotiating with private contractors to monitor thousands of cell phones, using their movements to produce real-time traffic conditions on 5,500 miles of roads statewide.

Privacy advocates are concerned about a technology that can track people. But transportation and technology leaders say the data gathered will remain anonymous.

A pilot program in Baltimore only tracks Cingular cell phones on 1,000 miles of road. AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia.

But the Missouri project is by far the most aggressive - tracking wireless phones across a whole state, including in rural areas with lower traffic counts, and doing so for the explicit purpose of relaying the information to other travelers.

Last modified October 11, 2005