The IMEI is usually sent over an encrypted channel, after the CIPHERING MODE COMMAND has been sent in GSM (although the specifications do not mandate this).

It is not possible to track your long term movements. GSM and UMTS use what is known as the TMSI - the Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity, which is a 32-bit temporary identifier which may not persist more than a few hours at a time.

Your IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) is only ever sent over the air in clear text in 'recovery' situations, where your mobility context cannot be retrieved from the previous VLR. Otherwise, new TMSIs are allocated over an encrypted channel, so it is extremely difficult to establish a chain of TMSIs.

So in short, it is not possible to establish your long term visiting trends, but it is possible to establish the length of time you spend in a shopping centre (as phones periodically re-register themselves with the network, even in the same location area), if your phone is otherwise idle.

Agreed. The meter is paid, who cares who paid for it? Stop double dipping.

Though on the topic of dick moves, the US has it pretty easy. Look for these vermin (The Melbourne City Council) are up to:

http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/AboutCouncil/MediaReleases/Pages/NewparkingtechnologyforCityofMelbourne.aspx

  In ground sensors - a device that records when a vehicle moves in and out of a parking bay. A five minute grace period will be built in and once a vehicle has overstayed the limit a signal will be sent to the nearest parking officer’s hand-held device. The in ground sensors will be progressively rolled out to 4,619 single marked bays across the CBD from 1 July to 30 October.

  Licence plate recognition systems – image processing technology used to identify a vehicle via its number plate in some residential areas. The system consists of a high speed digital camera, integrated GPS system and optical character recognition software. Two systems will be in operation in Flemington, Kensington, North Melbourne and Carlton. The license plate recognition technology will be on the road from 1 July.

This is simply a myth. The sending of text messages consumes network resources that cost money. How much they cost is a different question - and I am not disagreeing with you that the markup may be exhorbitant, but I do have to correct your claim.

In GSM, sending a text message still predominantly operates over an SDCCH (standalone dedicated control channel), which requires a full paging (for network originated) or random access cycle, encryption setup messages, authentication messages. The whole process can take around 5 seconds (don't believe me? put your phone on top of an old radio so you can hear the radio transmission activity..)

Where your claim is correct is during a call - the SMS uses the SACCH (slow associated CCH) which places minimal additional load on the network, but the majority of SMSes occur when the phone is not in a call.

Some GSM networks allow the text message to be send as a packet of data over GPRS/EDGE which greatly reduces radio-link (Um link) signalling burden.

Your experience is dated. In Guangdong Province, 2010, I found facebook & youtube completely blocked.

I also found anything containing prohibited keywords appeared to be blocked by means of sending an RST packet after a packet or two of data, so briefly you would see the text of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalai_Lama for example, before Firefox would advise that the 'connection was reset whilst the page was loading'. Furtheremore, additional requests to that website's IP were completely denied for some random time (typically a few minutes).

Even pages discussing the filter were blocked in much the same way.

All digital cellular phone standards in use today (GSM, UMTS, CDMA, etc) encrypt SMS messages and voice calls and it is almost always enabled.

That being said the strength of the various algorithms remains questionable (shameless plug).

But to say it is outright plaintext and broadcast is plain wrong.