Caught out by cellphone's secret message

By EUGENE BINGHAM

Mark Lundy was bugged with a locator beacon ... just like the one millions of New Zealanders carry.

The tracking device was so powerful it could pinpoint his location to within several hundred metres.

It was a cellphone.

Evidence in Lundy's double-murder trial showed how police traced where he was on the night of the killings by scanning through cellphone records.

The records not only showed when and to whom Lundy made calls - but where he was when the calls were made.

And a cellphone will pinpoint its owner's location even if it is not in use.

As long as it is turned on, it lets the telephone network know where it is about once every 20 minutes.

The information is recorded, enabling authorities to later trace where a cellphone - and, probably, it's owner - were at certain times.

In Australia, civil liberties groups complained when police admitted that they could track people if they were carrying "implanted transmitters".

In some cases, even streets could be identified but the accuracy was affected by interference from buildings, topography, and other cellphone traffic.

Police in Switzerland admitted they had been secretly tracking the movements of more than one million cellphone users.

In New Zealand, telephone companies store the information about the country's 2.3 million cellphones for up to seven years. Police and intelligence agencies can get that information with a search warrant.

A Telecom spokesman said yesterday that the company received about 12,000 requests a year for official access to information about cellphone, landline and internet users a year.

A Vodafone spokeswoman could not give a figure but said the company dealt with the police daily.

The Telecom spokesman said the information was not specific about the cellphone's location.

It could tell only the general area, but sometimes this could be useful in criminal investigations.

During the Lundy trial, evidence was given that on the morning after the murders, Lundy drove from within the reception area of Telecom's Johnsonville cellphone transmitter to Palmerston North's Tremaine Ave in 1hr 23min.

Records also showed that Lundy's 5.30pm call to his wife on the night of the murder went through the Petone transmitter and finished at 5.38pm.

Privacy Commissioner Bruce Slane is receiving public submissions on a proposed code that would limit what companies and agencies can do with cellphone information and how long the data could be kept.