It's worth noting that the Chinese government is in fact debuting a system to track the movements of every cell phone in Beijing right now:
http://beta.sg.news.yahoo.com/beijing-trial-mobile-tracking-...
This isn't a prediction, it's reality today.
http://beta.sg.news.yahoo.com/beijing-trial-mobile-tracking-...
This isn't a prediction, it's reality today.
Free software on phones? If anyone can sideload whatever they want onto any platform they want, it's the Chinese. How does this help you, when the cellphone towers are tracking your phone's every movement, and when attempts to evade that tracking are sufficient to get you arrested or worse?
The nature of the license for the software running on a radio has nothing to do with the ability to triangulate that radio, sadly.
But you don't have to disclose the fact that that radio source over there is jrockway's radio.
Freenet-style routing is an idea that comes to mind for solving this problem with software.
That being said, it's going to be really tough to find a technical solution that allows people to be found in an emergency, but not tracked by a Big Brother government. The solution might end up being legislative.