[kgo]

You can get a pay-go phone, sometimes with cheaper unlimited rates than AT&T and Verizon, although they won't subsidize the purchase of a nice smart phone. (And I'm not too happy with the data transfer speed on Boost.)

This obviously wouldn't prevent against a targeted attack. If the phone company or the government wanted to track YOU specifically, they could probably figure out your phone number by looking at the calls your family and friends have made and finding the union, and retrieve the info from there.

But if someone wants blanket info, i.e. a list off all the people at a G-20 protest or whatever, a computer won't be able to instantly figure out who you are. Someone would have to start investing real man-hours to accomplish this. This hopefully gets too cost-prohibitive for large scale tracking of the general population.

[lowprofile]

I think there is a move afoot to have to sign and show ID to get a pay-go phone so that they can tie the number back to an individual.

[elai]

I got a prepaid SIM at t-mobile recently and they asked for id. You can buy unused sims and such although.