Is it possible to retroactively trace a cell phone location?

GeorgeK said:

Do cell towers store data about cell phones? The scenario is police find a cell phone on a criminal but have not ever run a trace on it. Could they go back and retrace locations where the cell phone had been used?

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Yes.

If yes, does the call have to have been longer than X amount of time? Would the retroactive trace have to be within Y amount of time?

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Don't even have to make a call. If it's connected to cellular services, the cell companies have your location, and they'll keep it up to a year or more.

The police don't even need the phone. They can get the info directly from the cell companies.

The criminal can keep the battery and or data card pulled from the phone when not in use if necessary. I want them to be able to pull phone numbers to and from the phone, but not trace previous locations. If this is unrealistic for current technology I can always set it ten years ago or something.

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Keep it in airplane mode the whole time. Don't let it connect to any network.

The NSA has been collecting data for more than that, but they might refuse to provide any dat.

As kuwisdelu says, they will be able to trace the phone if it has been connected to the network. I know this technology was already available in the early 1990s, but have no idea when it started. An educated guess would be it has always been available on mobile phones. They'd almost have to have that information to bill you, and for people to be able to call you.

Police have been routinely tracing locations of suspects for years, and it has destroyed quite a few alibies.
It is also possible to find out if the phone has been connected to wifi networks.
Best bet if someone does not want to be tracked to a location is to leave the phone at home when going there.

The workaround if you absolutely have to use a phone, but do not want it to in any way be linked to you, is probably using both a cloned phone and sim-card. But, I do not personally know much about that.

Frankly I can't see a way for it only to be partially traceable. I think it's an either fully traceable or not traceable at all situation.

GeorgeK said:

If it's in airplane mode, could the baddie tell if there is an incoming call? Or would they have to take it out of airplane mode now and then to check?

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You need to be connected to the cellular network to receive incoming calls.

If the phone is connected to the cellular network, they have your location.

One could use Wi-Fi calling (like Skype) to avoid using the cell network, but Wi-Fi still provides an approximate location. However, it's possible the cell companies wouldn't have this location data, and it would only be stored locally on the phone (and on the service's servers, but maybe the police wouldn't know immediately they used a Wi-Fi calling service) which could be wiped. Your character would have to wipe the phone at some point, though, which means no numbers to get off it.

GeorgeK said:

Maybe I'll have to set it in the future and give the baddie some technobauble that deactivates only the GPS.

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Turning off GPS won't matter. You will still have an approximate location based on the cell towers.

Point is if you want to make calls or see incoming calls, there is pretty much no way to avoid having the location data being recorded somewhere the police will eventually get it.

And if the police can get anything off the phone, they'll pretty much necessarily be able to get location data too. It's basically all or nothing.

GeorgeK said:

Ok, I looked up cloned phones. I sort of understand the what, not the how, but don't care about the how anyway. If a phone is cloned, what does that do with the GPS data? Does it record bilocation, both the original and the clone's locations, or just one?

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A cloned phone/sim (sim cards are much more common) is an illegal copy of someone else's phone/sim. If, for instance, Hank clones Jim's phone/sim, then the phone companies data system will think Hank is Jim. So when Hank turns on his phone they will believe it is Jim who turned on his phone. Essentially cloning is done so you can use the mobile network without the authorities knowing you are doing it. Drug dealers used to do it.
However, cloning is a lot less helpful with smartphones, because any smartphones will have apps for logging into Facebook etc. It is possible to find out where you logged on to Facebook from. Facebook will share that info if they receive a court order. -In many places in the world that is easy for the police to get in a lower court.

GPS is very recent in phones. It is not how you will be traced by police. They will use the mobile base-stations you logged on to to track you. In large cities even one base station may put you in an area of just a few blocks. In a more rural setting distances will become larger, but mostly they will be relatively small.
But what will really get you is that phones have several bands, and you may be logged on to more than one basestation at a time. In some cases we are talking pinpointing people to single buildings in cities because of that.
You will also leave a very visible track of your movements every time your phone switches base-stations.

Basically if you have a mobile, especially a smart-phone, you are trackable as long as that is on.
I'm old enough to remember when living "off the grid" meant not registering an address and getting paid in-hand without it being registered. Today "off the grid" would mean doing that, plus not having any sort of electronic presence, no bankcard, and you'd have to stay away from CCTV. Basically, you have to live in a secret cabin in the woods and grow everything you need, and/or get someone who you trust to deliver things.

Just to make you aware here that although I know quite a bit about this, what I have is only pretty basic knowledge. If you want a mobile phone, and some traceablity inherent in that to be a plotpoint, I urge you to do some more research. Both left and right conspiracy sites would probably be a good starting point. -Although that may take a lot of research to figure out what is pure pparanoia and what is actually something authorities/companies do on a regular basis.

Mobile phones do a regular "handshake" to the nearest cell tower. Leave it beside a speaker and you will hear the signal pulse from time to time. When you first turn it on, it has to do the handshake before getting any texts or receiving any calls. As soon as there is a handshake, there is a location.

GeorgeK said:

Maybe I'll have to set it in the future and give the baddie some technobauble that deactivates only the GPS. It may have to be, "A wizard did it!"

As you can tell I don't know much about cell phones, don't even have a cell phone and don't know what terms to use to do a detailed search.

Ok, I looked up cloned phones. I sort of understand the what, not the how, but don't care about the how anyway. If a phone is cloned, what does that do with the GPS data? Does it record bilocation, both the original and the clone's locations, or just one?

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If the fantasy solution is possible for your story, you might want to use it. Far as i know, if you use a smartphone as a phone, or for any kind of information gathering or communication, or even use some apps (far more apps than many people realize), you can be pegged. If you have access to wizards, or technogenius hackers in your world, then you can have whatever you need for the story. For realism, your man will (if he's smart) just buy a throwaway phone at the 7-11 and keep replacing them as needed. Cheap and easy. Trackable, but why? By who? How would they know to track? People buy these things every day... millions of them. Some of my paranoid friends go this route.

Then there is always the old school... getting harder every single day, but its still out there. Land lines, payphones. Borrow or steal phones. I'm sure someone can suggest a good spy book or movie with all the 'off the grid' communication tricks.

I'm not an expert by any means, but the research I've done for my own books suggested that even airplane mode isn't enough -- in fact, even the phone being off often isn't enough to make it untraceable. My reading suggested the only way to ensure the cell phone disappears from the network is to pop the battery.

Here's your answer, straight from the real world. Give your baddie an old phone and make it an intentional decision (thereby making him more bad). It's the latest thing...

Cathy C said:

Here's your answer, straight from the real world. Give your baddie an old phone and make it an intentional decision (thereby making him more bad). It's the latest thing...

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Sorry, but that would not work. The article is bogus. You can't get a 2G sim-card in the UK anymore, and a 2G phone will not recognise a 3G sim-card. -I know, because I still have a 2G phone, and I pay for a 3G sim I can't use because I haven't gotten around to buying a 3G phone yet. (For those that have no idea what I talk about; My phone is not a smart phone.)
What the article talks about would only work if you have a non-registered 2G phone/sim-card that has been in use for years...and with the information GCHQ can gather, that will mean they would have LOADS of historical information to pinpoint you.

Besides, if you use a phone over time they would be able to have a very good idea of the location you use it from. If 150 people live in the area the phone is stationary at night, i.e. where you sleep, and 140 of those people have registered phones, it wouldn't be a problem to check out the last ten if we're talking a serious crime.

Like I said in my first post in this thread, mobiles have been traceable since at least the early 1990s.
There's lots of conspiranoia theories on how to avoid detection, but all they do is seperate you from those that don't try to hide what they are doing. Thereby making it a lot more likely that the authorities will take a second look at what you are doing.

slhuang said:

I'm not an expert by any means, but the research I've done for my own books suggested that even airplane mode isn't enough -- in fact, even the phone being off often isn't enough to make it untraceable. My reading suggested the only way to ensure the cell phone disappears from the network is to pop the battery.

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For airplane mode or turning the phone off not to be enough, the phone would have to be infected with malware that keeps those radios and services running when they're not supposed to.

I'll start worrying when my battery starts unexpectedly draining itself when it shouldn't be.

Weirdmage said:

Sorry, but that would not work. The article is bogus. You can't get a 2G sim-card in the UK anymore, and a 2G phone will not recognise a 3G sim-card.

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Not bogus. It's being reported by trusted sources, like this one, and this one, and this one. While they're featuring one particular unit: the Nokia 8210, that's because it's one of the few units that can access BOTH cellular networks and more modern digital towers, so the sim card will function. It's only been a few years (8) since digital towers were introduced in my region of central Texas, and only one company's network will still work here to this day: AT&T. True story! If a person from outside the region comes here and their carrier is Sprint or Verizon or any other national carrier--no phones. So a bunch of people don't have phones that use 4G or even 3G signals because towers carrying that signal were just erected last Christmas (2014). A bunch of areas here still have E signals, so there are a lot of old phones being used. Smart phones are still a minority where I live, so I really do see these phones every day.

kuwisdelu said:

For airplane mode or turning the phone off not to be enough, the phone would have to be infected with malware that keeps those radios and services running when they're not supposed to.

I'll start worrying when my battery starts unexpectedly draining itself when it shouldn't be.

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I couldn't remember where I'd read all that so I did a new search.

Washington Post:

By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off.

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That article doesn't say how, exactly, but this one breaks it down a bit and offers some hypotheses:

Surveillance alert: For almost a decade, the National Security Agency has had the ability to track cell phones, even when they're turned off.

But it all depends on what's meant by "track," "phone" and "off."

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They go on to break down the caveats, one of which is:

[...] old phones may not actually turn off, even if they appear to be powered down. For example, Graham said many old "feature phones," even when they were switched off, would have a baseband processor power up every 10 minutes or so to retrieve SMS messages, but not phone calls. "The moral of this is that just because you define the phone as 'off' doesn't mean that it's 100% completely 'off' all the time," he said.

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(this was just a quick search & skim, there's a lot more down that rabbit hole)

All this very well may not be contradictory to what you're saying about airplane mode, Kuwi. I just have my characters be extra paranoid and pop out the batteries.

It's been years since I've even had a phone with removable batteries.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what is happening here.

Police have the phone, which means they have the phone number. If the police have the phone number, they have the entire account information, which includes all calls, their duration, and the location.

Do you want to insert something into the system between the police finding the phone and the police getting the account information so that the police aren't able to figure out where the calls were made from?

Or are you looking for something that masks the location before the police acquire the phone? On a technical level, that's easy to accomplish, but I'd go with a burn phone, especially as my planning is all around the phone not being found.

Or do you have another scenario? Although understanding the basics can help, knowing what you need is more likely to give you an answer.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

Cathy C said:

Not bogus. It's being reported by trusted sources, like this one, and this one, and this one. While they're featuring one particular unit: the Nokia 8210, that's because it's one of the few units that can access BOTH cellular networks and more modern digital towers, so the sim card will function. It's only been a few years (8) since digital towers were introduced in my region of central Texas, and only one company's network will still work here to this day: AT&T. True story! If a person from outside the region comes here and their carrier is Sprint or Verizon or any other national carrier--no phones. So a bunch of people don't have phones that use 4G or even 3G signals because towers carrying that signal were just erected last Christmas (2014). A bunch of areas here still have E signals, so there are a lot of old phones being used. Smart phones are still a minority where I live, so I really do see these phones every day.

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I worked for a phone company in the UK. You'd need an old 2G sim card that was still in operation, that card would have so much history behind it that if you haven't managed to steal it without the original owner not noticing, you're not hiding anything.
Needer Vice, the Mirror, nor Business Insider are what I consider trusted sources on crime/intelligence news. Business insider cites the Vice article, and the Mirror quotes the same dealer as BI cites from Vice. This is one single source that is totally unverified. (My dad retired after working as a journalist for 42 years last year, and he learnt me to look at sources. Anything that does not have two independent sources or can not be verified as fact is considered suspect/unverified, depending on how reliable the single source has been in the past.)

I knew the US was far behind the rest of the world when it came to mobile phones, but that is quite extreme.
But. even so the phones will leave traces when they link to a tower, every time.

As a sidenote when it comes to older phones. There is a company where I used to live in Norway that specialises in recovering old data. They've helped the police get hard evidence on some poeple. I don't remember how many "layers" of old data they can dig through (what they have admitted, they highly likely can do more than that,) but they did manage to get dat from aphone that had been buried outside if I remember correctly.
Electronic information doesn't disappear as easily as many people think. (That last sentence is a general obversation.)