Celldar - The next radar?

BusinessWeek reports of a new technology that uses upiquitous cell-phone signals to create cost effective radar through cell towers!

This is a really kewl approach to the radar issue. Because its a passive system (there is no transmitter only a receiver) you could not actually pin point the location of the celldar station, rendering it invisible to you.. but allows it to see everything.

It sounds exciting. You can use all the cell towers around the country to map out movement of virtually anything, or anyone. (Uh oh.. the privacy people are gonna go nuts). An interesting tangent from this is that Lockheed-Martin is building a system using FM radio and TV signals to do the same thing. With these signals being much stronger, they can actually passive-radar as far as 135 miles away. They call the technology Silent Sentry, and I can see why. And the kicker, instead of spending $20-$30 Million on a radar system, these things can be made for lik $20,000. HUGE savings that can be passed on to the right people. Imagine every airport now having radar! (Most don't you know)

This has to make you think though. If you can triangulate a cell signal from 3 towers, and then lock onto the user holding the phone, you could "mark" him and then use the software in celldar to track him. Go ahead Osama, make that next phone call!

Fiction becoming reality? We will have to see.