So Says "Ask Yahoo"...
We've all seen movies where the cops try to dupe some telephoning wacko into droning on about his plans to blow up Rhode Island, just long enough to complete a trace on the call. But Slate's Explainer describes how this longtime Hollywood trope no longer applies:
We've all seen movies where the cops try to dupe some telephoning wacko into droning on about his plans to blow up Rhode Island, just long enough to complete a trace on the call. But Slate's Explainer describes how this longtime Hollywood trope no longer applies:
"Tracing problems are a relic of manual switchboards, which required operators to physically connect circuits. In order to track down a caller's location, police needed 10-20 minutes to figure out the maze of circuits....shorter calls could only be traced back...to a nearby switching station rather than the source phone.
Read the rest of this answer here.