Telephone Meta Data Can Track Your Location

Evidence in a lawsuit against a Truck Driver shows that the driver's claimed location (Blue Line) differs from his phone's Meta Data.

Telephone Meta Data Can Track Your Sleep

Evidence in a lawsuit against a Truck Driver shows the maximum amount of sleep the driver may have had prior to an accident

Ben Levitan(Cell Phone Expert)
919/420-0924 (mobile)
Www.ThatCellPhoneGuy.com
Use of Meta-Data by the NSA

It is claimed that the NSA is receiving the Meta-Data of millions of telephone users on a daily basis. Meta-Data as it is being called in the news is actually standard telephone industry records known as "Call Detail Records" or CDRs. A CDR is a record of a phone call that the phone company creates every time you make or receive a phone call. A record is created even if the call doesn't go through. Call Detail Records are essential to the day to day operation of the phone system. These records are used for billing, trouble shooting and measuring the quality of the phone network. The data also is being used by in the court of law because they are considered reliable and accurate reflections of telephone use.

Each call detail record contains, the time and date of the call as well as the duration of the call. Further, the records show what cell towers were used by a phone during the phone call. The purpose of keeping this data is to determine how many people are using each cell tower and be able to determine if the tower is operating properly. The tower, also identifies the users location. This helps in law enforcement, to determine people's whereabouts. The location is not precise. In general, a Call Detail Record will report which cell tower a user is connected. The coverage area of each cell tower is approximately three to six square miles. This is very useful for law enforcement and tracking purpose, but is limited in placing a phone user at an exact location. Ben Levitan, in his work as an expert witness in matters related to cell phones uses this meta data frequently in analyzing cases. The drawing to let show the analysis of cell phone data of a truck driver who was involved in an accident. There was a question as to the driver's location during the day. The driver produced his legally required "Driver's Logs" as evidence of his location. Ben Levitan obtained the driver's phone records for the same time period and from the "Meta-Data" was able to determine the user's location throughout the day based on where his cell phone connected to cell towers. As shown in the exhibit to the left, the location of the user's cell phone, based on his meta data, conflicts with the location the driver claimed in his driver's logs.

The driver was accused of failing to get proper rest as required by Federal law. Through examination of the call detail records (meta-data) Ben Levitan was able to determine that in the nine days prior to the accident, the driver got little sleep. The records provide valuable information about the users location and activity. It was further determined from the records that the driver called his eye doctor 28 times. This seems unusual and was investigated based on Mr. Levitan's report. Meta-Data in court cases must be obtained by subpoena and approved by a judge. NSA's blanket pulling of this data likely allows them to achieve significant information about all users and likely the data is used to fish for connections to known terrorist or other national security concerns.