Since the Sept. 11 attacks, conventional warfare has been replaced by local terrorist cells planning and carrying out highly coordinated assaults while living in the middle of civilian populations. Efforts to root out these insurgents have proved to be a messy and complex affair, making it difficult for U.S. troops and allies to separate friend from foe in the immediate aftermath of an attack.
Successful engagement of the enemy relies on formulating a quick, appropriate response, with highly precise location technology, before insurgents are able to melt back into the population.
On the other side of the world, the U.S. Congress and Defense Department are debating the Pentagon's budget and setting priorities about what weapons and technologies the military will develop to stem this new reality. This is an excellent opportunity to apply new technology to help the U.S. armed forces identify and track insurgents who live and mingle within civilian populations.
In some scenarios, the U.S. military may be able to work with allied governments and local telecom companies to use lawful intercept (LI) solutions to monitor wireless communications of enemy combatants, tracing conversations and data transmissions to uncover future attacks.
Technology exists today that accurately pinpoints the location to within tens of meters of mobile devices sending and receiving transmissions. Adding highly accurate location information to existing LI solutions would allow American forces and local law enforcement agencies to better identify and engage insurgents in addition to intercepting their communications.
Planners in Congress and the Pentagon need to consider funding this new technology. Instead of relying exclusively on interpreting intercepted data and voice communications, the military would be able to reliably plot the location of enemy combatants and turn intercepted information into actionable intelligence.
What if a group of insurgents hiding in the mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border uses a mobile device to detonate a bomb outside a busy international hotel in Kandahar?
Using LI solutions, the U.S. military, in cooperation with local authorities, could set up a geo-fence around the hotel and plot all wireless activity that took place inside the zone, quickly identifying a mobile device near the blast zone that received a transmission the exact moment the bomb went off. From that information, they would be able to uncover the phone number of the device, the SIM card number, a hardware ID number and, ultimately, a lead on how the phone and SIM came into existence.
Call logs could then be analyzed to determine the phone number of the detonating trigger call and precisely where that call was made. Subsequent wireless transmissions from that device can then be plotted on a map in a virtual bread crumb trail, effectively setting off a manhunt hundreds of miles away from the blast zone.
Because LI solutions can track locations to within tens of meters, even if the attackers try to blend in with the civilian population, they can be pinpointed in a specific building or even the exact room.
In this real-life scenario, access to highly accurate location information can help military personnel quickly react to highly coordinated events and engage enemy combatants before they can disappear into the local population.
The key to implementing location information in LI solutions is accuracy. In the above example, existing location technologies such as GPS would be useless because the combatants would not be using GPS-enabled phones or would simply turn that capability off. When GPS is available, line-of-sight issues make it unreliable in dense urban and indoor environments.
Other technologies, such as Cell-ID, which uses crude location from cell towers to determine the approximate position of a handset, can determine location only to within several hundred meters.
A method that can provide the appropriate level of accuracy is Wireless Location Signatures (WLS), a technology that uses the principle that every location has a unique radio frequency signature. Like a fingerprint's pattern of lines and swirls, a location can be identified by a unique set of values including measurements of neighboring cell signal strengths, time delays and other parameters.
Unlike GPS, pattern matching using WLS is enhanced by surrounding buildings and other clutter, using the interference to enrich handset signatures. As the technologies on mobile devices improves, the signatures become richer and further improve accuracy - perhaps one day even providing vertical coordinates in large buildings or deep within caves.
Engineered correctly, LI solutions could be accessed across armed forces, by government branches and by local law enforcement on the ground, allowing them to quickly turn mountains of intercepted raw data into actionable intelligence. Congress and the Defense Department should take the lessons from the past eight years and arm their forces with the technology to react swiftly to a highly coordinated, extremely mobile and increasingly technical adversary. ■
Martin Feuerstein is chief technology officer of Polaris Wireless, a global leader in high-accuracy, software-based location systems to the wireless market.
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