> The fact that cellular technology can accurately pinpoint within a few feet of your exact location (LESS THAN 10 feet

Umm, it can't. Accuracy anything like that is only possible if you have one of the phones with a GPS built in (even then, the errors are more usually a few hundred feet, 10 feet requires DGPS and staying put for several minutes). Without the GPS, radio triangulation of cellular signals gets resolutions more like one to two thousand feet. Of course, that may be enough to worry you. Plain old cellular technology, without triangulation, only gets your location down to a cell, which can be a huge area.

> the fact that NSA satellites can zoom (er...hone) in any given signal (again) within a few feet (e.g.; having your nosehairs clearly photographed by a satellite?)

That also isn't really possible. There are fundamental physical limits to the image resolution, which depends on the size of the imaging aperture and the wavelength of the signal imaged. We have a rough idea how big the apertures are, and it's likely that the "pixel size" on visible light pictures is on the order of several inches -- enough to determine a person's height and perhaps race and gender, but not to identify individuals, and certainly nothing like enough to identify nosehairs. Such high resolutions are likely to be only used on high priority targets because otherwise they would generate excessively enormous haystacks of data to trawl through.

On the other hand at typical radio frequencies they have to deal with *much* longer wavelengths (gives worse resolution) but can use synthetic aperture techniques to "stretch" the aperture to compensate somewhat, so it's a bit harder to estimate, but anything under five hundred feet would be surprising.

> The technician came online and stated "You are currently located in blah-blah-blah town, right?" My eyes went wide.

All he was doing is looking at what cell tower your phone had connected to. On many modern phones, you can get the screen to display this information yourself. Of course it is vital for the network to know what tower your phone is connected to, in order to be able to route calls to you. But this information, whilst potentially a security threat, is not exactly "pinpointing". GSM cells can be up to 20 miles in radius. CDMA cells can be even bigger. Cells in the city are usually smaller, only a few blocks across, but sometimes freak signal reflections cause you to connect to towers a long distance away. I once worked in an office building (on the 20th floor) where at my desk my phone connected to a cell tower 6 miles to the south east, while at the water cooler 20 feet away it connected to a tower 3 miles to the north. Not exactly "pinpointing"!!

> Did you know that even a one-way, numeric-only pager can be tracked?

I seriously doubt that to be true. The simple fact is one-way pagers do not include a transmitter and have nowhere to put it and no way to power it if they wanted to. It's true that a receive-only radio circuit sometimes can be detected from leakage of harmonic emissions from its demodulation circuits. However, this is not something that can be picked up from the paging network; it is a very short range effect. It is also very unlikely (I won't go so far as to say impossible) that a *particular* pager could be identified in this way, as the pager's knowledge of its network ID is not related to its radio receiving circuits -- although once a pager had been locally IDed, it might be possible to stay "locked on" to it through small errors in its tuning etc. which distinguished it from other similar devices.

> I normally use this bag for my electronic automatic tolling device, which is now being used to track my speed on the tollway locally where I live.

I'd agree that is a sensible precaution for anyone who values their privacy. The rest is overkill unless you are on the FBI's most wanted list. In fact, taking the batteries out of your one-way pager and wrapping it in foil is overkill even if you *are* on the FBI's most wanted list.

> This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...

Ironically, in reality that message will probably be preserved until the fall of western civilization 8^)

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