Back 8 years ago, we used Grain Silos for towers throughout western Oklahoma and parts of Texas to bring high speed wireless internet to rural areas. The business plan did not support having to build new towers and many of those businesses would still be using dial up! It also allowed young internet related companies to do their start ups in small towns with low overhead. It was really good for rural Oklahoma.

The guest who commented on April 2, 2008 mostly ranted about government conspiracies and political generalizations. Whether even half of it had any merit or not, made sense or not, or was even on topic doesn\'t matter because everyone is entitled to their opinion. Normally, I\'d completely ignore a post like that... in this case, I\'ll ignore about 90% and and chime in about the practicality of the 10% he was talking about cell towers:

Can you be tracked by cell towers?
Yes. If your cell phone is turned on and within range of a tower, the company can narrow your position to the nearest tower easily... it\'s even possible to track you to within a few feet using triangulation IF you\'re in range of 2, 3, or more towers. (more than 3 is pretty unlikely since most companies share towers and try to build as few sites as possible while maintaining solid coverage.)

Government agencies can and do track criminal suspects through their cell phones... when they have access to enough info about the suspect... with help/permission from the cell phone companies with a warrant and special permission. This combination of factors doesn\'t come up very often so it\'s not a common practice. Based on your above statements, you no doubt believe that the government frequently (if not continuously) does the same thing without permission or authorization.

I would highly doubt such a claim. The wireless companies are already pretty busy maintaining and upgrading their systems. It would be extremely difficult for anyone in the government to gain access to the system without them knowing about it and you can bet each company would complain publicly if they were forced to comply to giving the government full access to their systems, especially since such broad governmental interference isn\'t legally authorized.

So,I guess that leaves us with the potential for secret deals between CEOs and top secret branches of government. Even with the right combination of hush money, blackmailing, and sweet deals with the company(s) in question.... thousands of the regular employees would have to know about or at least notice what was going on. Have you heard anyone speak up? Have there been lots and lots of mysterious deaths among wireless company techs? I don\'t know but it\'s quite a stretch of the imagination.

It\'s also pretty impractical to track everyone all at once. Can you imagine the data involved in 200 million wireless devices being tracked simultaneously minute-by-minute!?! It\'s not impossible but it would cost about the same as the entire current tower system did to build in the first place. \"Sure Uncle Sam, we\'ll double our expenses in an already cut-throat market just to help you find out how often Suzi Jones goes to the supermarket for your own fiendish plans.\" That\'s exactly what I would say if I was an already over-paid CEO with nothing much to gain from the deal and plenty to lose... but I\'m not most CEOs.

I have a few questions of my own on the topic: Why would the government even want to know the exact location of every US citizen at a given moment? What do you have to hide and/or why do you care if the government know when you\'re at home and when you\'re at work? (they can probably find you either place 80% of the time anyways) How would the government know that it\'s you carrying around the wireless device in question and not your wife, teenage daughter, best friend, or random cell-phone thief? When will the microchip implants be installed, birth? How will they be powered, bio-electrical energy from the human nervous system? Have they found a safe place to put them that won\'t show up on X-rays and CAT scans (or be ripped out by the magnets in MRIs) or will they just blackmail doctors to delete and/or ignore them when they do show up?

Americans (some more than others) are highly suspicious of the government and it\'s vast powers. I don\'t know why we\'re not just as suspicious of the major corporations with similar power over our lives. The government, in general, is too slow and bureaucratic to accomplish the evil (and beautifully cinematic) schemes that we\'ve come to fear even half as efficiently as some of the massive corporations out there potentially could.

There\'s plenty to fear out there, at least spice up your paranoid little lives by picking something new to fear every once in a while. Don\'t be so boring and stereotypical.

By the way, Santa Clause knows when you\'re sleeping AND when you\'re awake. You better get started on making some bombs and walking up to the North Pole to take care of that creepy old man once and for all!

[The country might be in bad shape but I don\'t really believe there\'s an evil master plan behind it all. Even if things get much, much worse around here, it\'ll take something pretty devastating to make us as bad off as most African or Asian countries. To think, all this paranoia over something as mundane as basic wireless infrastructure!]

Well...They just give the church a generous donation and they don’t think twice about putting it up.