From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (Bill_Stewart(HOY002)1305)
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 93 14:38:29 PDT
To: hkhenson@cup.portal.com
Subject: Re: Beepers can also be used to track you down!
Message-ID: <9308132123.AA26208@anchor.ho.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


There is one way to track someone with a beeper - you call them,
leave your number, and trace the call if they call back.
It doesn't work for people who only accept calls from certain numbers
(mid-level drug dealers, for instance) or use other authentication
(voice pagers, or codes you dial along with the number),
and it's worth calling them from a pay phone in case they recognize
the usual pay-phone numbers (if you live in an area where you can
still call back to a pay-phone.)

It's not generally possible to locate specific beepers from the miniscule amount
of IF that they generate, especially since many of them work by listening to
a standard frequency and only beeping if there's a specific message sent
to alert that user; at most you could find someone using that beeper company.
As an extreme case, consider Skypage, which is satellite-based :-)

On the other hand, if you're trying to figure out which of the 
<politically targeted ethnic group members> hanging around on the street corner
is the drug dealer, and you know the popular local beeper companies'
frequencies and addressing, you _could_ set up a transmitter that
loops through the addresses and see who pulls out a beeper and heads
for the pay phone....  It may take a while if the beepers support
10,000 or 4 billion addresses, but you can limit your search a bit if the
beeper company or stool pigeons have provided you the numbers of the
usual suspects...  Sounds like a good reason to design a paging system
with a large sparse address space to prevent brute-force searches,
and not to key the address directly off your home phone number
or anything obvious like that.

		Bill, who doesn't carry a beeper and whose sales of
		dangerous addictive drugs are normally limited to caffeine...