When I was working at EFF, I started writing (but never finished) a couple of essays along the lines of "the degree of trackability of mobile phones is an unfortunate accident, and we should fix it".
It basically comes from routing requirements (especially to receive incoming phone calls) combined with billing requirements (to make people pay for their connectivity) combined with the empirical requirement to see which base station a device is connected to, and which other base stations can see it at a given moment.
If you aggregate all of that data, then you know a (geographically moderate-resolution) complete history of where almost all people have been at almost all times, and patterns of their habits and whom they probably recurrently spent time with.
Not all of this data has to be collectable, because these things could be disaggregated by introducing different protocol layers. For example, you could pay the mobile company for data connectivity, but use cryptographic blinding mechanisms so that it doesn't know which specific subscriber obtained connectivity at a particular place and time. (Those blinding mechanisms could be implemented inside of SIM cards, so the SIM card's task is to cryptographically prove "I am a SIM card of a current paying subscriber of carrier X" rather than "I am SIM card number 42d1b5c0".) You could have device hardware IDs be ephemeral rather than permanent. Actual messaging and call services could all be "over the top" (as phone industry jargon puts it), provided by people who are not the phone company itself.
This disaggregation is a straightforward improvement from a privacy point of view because it prevents companies from knowing things about you that they didn't need to know in order to provide services.
Meanwhile, in the world we live in, we see governments trying to make it harder to make phones less trackable, by putting legal restrictions on changing hardware addresses, or requiring legal ID in order to establish service. I imagine that an additional cryptographic indirection layer in SIMs to prevent carriers from linking a permanent identifier to a network registration (or specific data use) would also be banned in some places if it were invented.
This shouldn't be inevitable. One thing that made me think about this was when there was a little scandal (which I was a small part of) about companies tracking device wifi MAC addresses for commercial purposes. There was a little industry that would try to recognize people and build commercial profiles based on recognizing that the same device was present (in fact, at the time, even if it didn't actually connect to the wifi -- because a typical wifi-enabled mobile device was sending broadcast wifi probe packets that included its MAC address). So Apple was like "this is a bad use of MAC addresses, which only exist to distinguish devices that happen to be on the LAN at the same time, and perhaps to allow network administrators to assign permanent IP addresses to specific devices", and they made iPhones randomize wifi MAC addresses for some purposes, mostly fixing that particular issue.
We could think just the same way about GSM networks: "these identifiers exist for specific protocol reasons; using them for device or user tracking is an abuse that should be mitigated technically".
Did you ever get to the point of hypothesizing good ways to align incentives to make this happen? It is hard to tell (having not thought much about it) whether this is a “smart well meaning engineers need to make new standards” problem, a “we need to harness the power of corporate greed problem,” or something else.
I seem to remember a discussion here on HN a few years back about a paper which outlined ways to decouple technical identifiers from personal identifiers on mobile networks.
My memory is a bit hazy but maybe it was the whitepaper for PGPP[0] that OP mentioned?
isn’t detailed information about the user equal to additional billing power? perhaps the only disincentive that exists to having that information would be such overwhelming risk/liability that it would outweigh the profit potential of having it in the first place. it seems to me the relative incentives have reached a oretty stable equilibrium…
There's a certain flavor of US libertarian that complains that they should only be taxed for exactly the road-surfaces they personally use in proportion to how much they use them.
In response, I like to point out to them that their dream of "fair billing" can't occur without a nightmare of surveillance, making it easy for the government (or road-owners, and indirectly the government) to track and remember everybody's movements in excruciating detail.
Is that worth it? Perhaps a "sloppy" billing system (e.g. fuel/mileage taxes for roads) is actually an extraordinarily good deal in terms of the privacy we take for granted.
(I guess Andrew Blumberg moved from Stanford to the University of Texas.)
There might be an inherent tradeoff where you need at least one of {tamper-resistant trusted meters, at least slightly noisy measurements, potential deanonymization}. For example, the short paper mentions that "point tolls" are easy to make anonymous using any form of anonymous digital cash (or blinded tokens issued by the tolling authority!), but the exact usage billing you mention people wanting is much more detailed than a point toll like that. It might indeed be inherently impossible to get all the way there without detailed surveillance.
Agreed, I always think that all these taxes should indeed just go through fuel. Want a bigger, heavier, more polluting car? Want to drive like a F1 driver? Fine, you pay more. Want to drive a long distance? You'll pay per distance*car_size. Want to go electric? You'll pay tax on electricity in concordance with it's economic price and influence on the planet.
One problem in the EU is is that this would need to be rolled out across the EU, because we already have large difference in price ranges for fuel leading to weird situations neer the border.
Get on a toll road, pay for a ticket, done.
Drive on a normal road, pay for gas, done.
I guess you could make it extremely specific, but then the problem isn't the surveillance, but the price of the cost analysis of driving 1,7 miles on a road in bumfuck nowhere with a J lbs vehicle, exerting X pressure on the road at a standstill going at [Y] speeds, thus generating Z total pressure over time H. In addition the road was I% wet due to rain the day prior.
Thanks for sharing. I figured it is extremely difficult to spoof or disaggregate the data by ourselves, given the SIM tracking wifi tracking thing basically 7/24, or is there a way to fix it?
I have no technical knowledge about these, and being cryptocurrency related there will be lots of exasperated huffs, but there are a couple of alternative mobile network related projects: World Mobile and Helium.
World Mobile claims 99% coverage of the US, although I think it uses existing networks where there's no native coverage.
They're "interesting", but only early days, and I don't know how close they come to what you describe for privacy and opposition to data aggregation. Large-geographic-area comms coverage isn't something that there's ever going to be a lot of options for.
I was imagining mobile operators that cooperated to some extent with the changes I was proposing, or at least didn't obstruct them. If it's using existing GSM protocols, the IMEI would have to be rotated frequently (and it's not that obvious how to do that without making the connection between the old IMEI and the new IMEI apparent), and the SIM technology would have to change. (What it's trying to prove in a privacy-friendly communications system is more like subscriber entitlement, not subscriber identity!)
There's also the "netheads and Bellheads" theory from the 1990s which can be taken to say that phone companies would never make technical changes to make themselves collect less data, or to be less helpful to government surveillance. Sometimes I think this is right. I still remember how I took part in a meeting with a mobile phone industry association or industry consortium of some sort about a year before the Snowden stuff. Someone on my side said "so, let's talk a bit about surveillance issues", and someone on the other side replied "sorry, that's something we don't talk about". Imagine an industry meeting with privacy advocates where the industry people are completely precommitted to not talking about surveillance!
I absolutely understand the sentiment and the goals that citizens should, by default, not be tracked. However, how do you square that with the proof, time and again, that truly secure and encrypted networks are primarily use by criminals (drug/human traffickers, and plenty of other people) who, through their trade, make the world a shittier place for the rest of us?
If we accept that the right to privacy is real, that not being followed, watched, and monitored every hour of my life, is something democratic societies should strive for:
Your reasoning is so biased that it is hard for me to wrap my head around it, but at the same time it's very common because it confuses the tool with the crime. Criminals use cars and phones, too, but we don't ban them for everyone.
The argument ignores the catastrophic cost of the solution: destroying privacy for all of us. Creating a backdoor for police doesn't just hinder criminals; it makes everyone's data, from journalists to your medical records, vulnerable to hackers and abuse.
I believe we stop crime with good policing, not by building a system of total surveillance that sacrifices the very freedom we're trying to protect.
But this has been "squared" already. Can the police enter your home without a warrant? No? Why? I bet criminals are pretty secretive around their stuff too, no?
I'm unconvinced that secure communications is the bottle neck when it comes to criminal prosecution. We can expand police power without sacrificing our communications like that.
Anecdotally, take a look at China where privacy doesn't exist and yet Chinese syndicates are responsible for a major chunk of the issues you've listed. So clearly lack of privacy doesn't even correlate with decreased criminal behavior.
If you have two networks, one encrypted and one not, and the unencrypted network is significantly easier / cheaper to use or has better network effects, that's where most people will naturally flock. The only ones who will put in the effort to use the encrypted one are criminals and a few principled technologists / civil libertarians. In such a world, the mere fact of using the encrypted network is suspicious in itself.
We define "criminals" here as "anybody the government doesn't like." In the US, this is mostly child predators, drug traffickers, thieves, and maybe a few (legal) sex workers. In other places, this is mostly homosexuals, human-rights activists, journalists and the opposition.
The way to fix the "witch hunt" problem is to make all networks encrypted and secure.
While cryptocurrency is mostly used by criminals, as the traditional financial system is just good enough for most people, TLS is used by everybody, as it is just the default way to do things on the internet nowadays. This is despite the fact that TLS makes wiretapping criminals' communications much harder.
The US and Europe[1] should use the influence they have over standards bodies to make prosecuting the latter group of "criminals" much harder, recognizing that this comes at the expense of also letting some criminals in the EU/US sense of the word run free. It is just the morally right thing to do.
[1] I mostly mean American and European companies and organizations which participate in the process of standard setting, not governments, which mostly cannot do things for complicated political reasons.
Better remove the locks on your house and bathroom and set up a public webcam while you're at it. After all, I'm not sure you're not a criminal, and to be sure of that I — and the rest of society — need to be able to observe you in your bathroom.
"innocent until proven guilty" exists for a reason.
It’s quite easy to square: your argument is nonsense through and through, barely deserving an iota of rebuttal. I could justify absolutely appalling invasions of privacy with what you’re saying.
We are not beholden to ruining everything for almost everyone to stop a small fee from doing bad things. It’s not any more complicated than that.
One thing I didn't see covered is to never have your "real phone" and your "burner phone" on you (or in the same location) at the same time while powered.
Easy enough to say "Gee...these 2 phones are always together or nearby when activated" or "this phone shuts off right before this one powers up".
Although, I suspect there are a few other ways to determine identity easier. Such as tracking the device identifier and then looking up nearby public facing cameras.
So many online services use the proximity of phones to determine things like related persons and related accounts. Facebook is notorious for this. In one building I lived at Facebook would constantly show me the names of everyone coming in and out as "You might know this person" even though I had no idea who they were.
I have no idea how this isn’t illegal. I’ve experienced the same horrifying loss of anonymity before. People I met long ago and definitely do not want knowing my real name showing up as Instagram suggested friends.
Or people who stay next door at an Airbnb and I had a quick chat with in person, like I didn't give them any contact information nor did they give me theirs so how ...
Also, never power up or down, or switch in or out of airplane mode on your burner while at home (or work). Cellular network disconnection and connection events are rare and hence notable.
I am not sure I agree with this. I don't think that running out of battery or rebooting a phone is that rare.
But more importantly, if these events are noticeable and Alice does what you suggest she is probably going to highlight her location. Especially if she naively waits till she is 15 minutes from home to switch her burner on. Over time there will be a circle around her house of no burner phone network attach events.
"If you're going to keep your phone in a bag of potato chips, then keep your phone in a bag of potato chips" --Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) Carl the T800.
In many countries you need a valid government ID document to activate a mobile service which means burners do not really exist in those places.
Unless you bought a pixel, graphene’d it and then paid a homeless person to activate a pre-paid data only sim which you would top up with vouchers paid in cash and used a von and international voip service…
Silent link esims are quite good for getting your phone to work on any country or network. I have one, not for privacy but more for better phone coverage and it works pretty well. No ID and you pay in crypto - btc/monero etc. (https://silent.link/)
For me the main use is that I'm on o2 in the UK, but if in some dead spot with no signal I can flip the sim settings and connect via EE or whatever.
Are you able to select which mobile network you use? At least in the US the price for tmobile is about triple that of att so it would be pretty hard to predict your spend if it switches between them without warning.
> which means burners do not really exist in those places.
This is very wrong. In Germany you can go to any shady kiosk in a big city and buy a pre activated SIM card invariably registered to some Arabic or Pakistani name.
You can buy it in cash. Completely untraceable if you take care of CCTV.
I was surprised when a SIM I purchased on Amazon was not only able to connect in China but was also able to bypass the great firewall. I wonder how these travel sims get round the government regulations.
It's because the government regulations only apply to Chinese citizens. My first trip to China was back in the '00s, and I went for work. I was also surprised to find that my home SIM worked just fine there without any interference from the Great Firewall.
Roaming works somewhat unintuitively from what you'd expect. You do indeed connect to the local mobile network, but all of your data traffic is tunneled back to your home wireless provider's PoP. I realized this once I checked what websites I was visiting saw as my public IP address, and it was an address from a network in Texas!
So China's Great Firewall can't actually inspect or block your traffic while you're traveling, and using roaming on your home mobile network's SIM. It's all sent over the equivalent of a VPN to your home soil before going out to the public internet. This iswhy latency can be pretty bad while roaming.
They bypass the firewall precisely because they're roaming SIMs. Their internet connection goes through the home operator.
I imagine they simply don't allow selling such SIMs in China. It would be extremely easy to track and flag any that were e.g. used for longer than a few weeks.
It's how data roaming works in general -- it's tunneled through to the SIM's home provider. Conversely, a Chinese SIM roaming overseas is still subject to the Great Firewall.
They just don't enforce the exact same restrictions on roaming users. I suppose there are risks of tourists spilling the beans, so to speak, they just don't view that as a severe unmitigated risk.
True on the Government ID document but most of the times the portal to activate would allow for any sort of numbers as long as it was in a proper format - whether or not it was valid.
These allow for self activation, have a lockout of 5 failed attempts or so and can be done via sim card codes (not SMS, but you interact with a program on the simcard and low level carrier services.)
> In many countries you need a valid government ID document to activate a mobile service which means burners do not really exist in those places.
Buying prepaid SIMs from tourists or foreign students returning home is a reasonable easy workaround for that - at least if you're the sort of person who meets and befriends those sort of people.
It doesn't specifically help with obtaining a SIM without presenting ID, but it does help make it easier to avoid later leaking your true identity to Google/Apple/etc. once you start using the phone.
If you need to communicate with people in your area and not be tracked; MeshCore software with LoRa hardware like the this https://lilygo.cc/en-ca/products/t-lora-pager is something to consider. Text only, completely offline
If you need to do this then start by figuring out why you need to do it, and adjust your approach too your threat model.
Because the most significant evidence we have lately is that in-person meetings or dead drops and other low tech means are how you avoid being tracked.
Turning on any sort of radio transmitter is just turning on a big flash light into the sky.
Turning on anything relatively uncommon is even worse: normal people have cellphones and use them. They don't use LoRa devices, there aren't a lot of LoRa devices and someone who only uses LoRa devices will stand out in any dataset.
> Because the most significant evidence we have lately is that in-person meetings or dead drops and other low tech means are how you avoid being tracked.
How many cameras did you just go by? did you have your cell phone on you? how many networks did it connect too? how many bluetooth broadcasts did it passively send out? Not being tracked and being in public are slowly becoming an untenable duo.
Yes!!! I've been wanting to make something like this for a long time. But unless the firmware is open source I wouldn't trust this for anything secure. But this looks like a dev kit so I can do whatever I want.
I’ve tried them on snowmobile trails. With the vegetation the range was about a mile.
Range can be 100+ miles though if you can establish line of sight. Depending on the scenario, a high elevation repeater could give several mobile devices pretty significant range.
Range is line of sight. If you can see it, even if 100 miles away, odds are it'll work. Seattle area has one of the better networks for MeshCore. Tacoma to Vancouver BC is the range for semi reliable messaging
1. starting with threat modeling (though they don't call it that);
2. mentioning that your OPSEC affects not only you but also people connected to you; and
3. mentioning that maybe you should just leave the device at home (because it's basically a surveillance machine that you pay for).
(A more common article format would be to unload a pile of supposed security&privacy measures without putting them into context, and wouldn't properly set expectations for what that gives you. Neither of which is very helpful, and can be very counterproductive.)
Step one is already difficult here in Australia: to do so you must hand over your personal details and ID. At least that was true for anything with a SIM card for sale back in the 2010s
So the “step 0” was “find a retailer who didn’t follow the rules”, and they’d usually be a corner store selling handsets or SIM cards by the bucket load to all sorts of interesting characters
This was already the case in Australia as early as 2003. I distinctly remember being shocked that I had to provide ID when I bought a phone from a store for the first time.
And also be aware of "shoulder surfing", which is different today in 2 ways it wasn't in the past.
In the past, the risk was something like someone looking at you type in your PIN on a bank ATM, or maybe your password on an computer keyboard.
Today, shoulder surfing is mainly different in 2 ways: (1) near-ubiquitous high-resolution surveillance camera networks, which can be places/scale and capture images that humans practically didn't; and (2) with machine learning, they don't even need to see what buttons you press, only see movements of your arm.
(Randomizing button positions on a touchscreen can help, and also help fight forensics like traces your fingers leave for where they touch. But randomization means you need to be able to see your screen, which reduces the ways you have to hide your screen from the view of others.)
In addition to surveillance cameras and video of movement, AI can also determine what keys your pressing on a keyboard of an airgapped computer, merely by the sounds you make when you type
This post has an obvious rewritten-by-LLM smell to it. That's okay and increasing common but it's giving me a kind of funny feeling with regards to the content which I'd like to examine more.
Firstly, What's the current opinion on using third party LLMs by the infosec community? Secondly it's more philosophical: do activists on the ground embrace this new tech or fight against it? Or is it an amoral tool, like what a phone is considered to be? Is there a distinction between the big third party APIs and local on device use?
(If it helps, the feeling is a bit like a seeing a Linux developer use an Apple mac for development)
The Dumphone Finder (https://josebriones.org/dumbphone-finder) referenced there is useful, too, if you need to get a phone a 90 year old person has a chance of being able to use.
I have the feeling that whenever you are on an airport (and maybe railway stations too) they cross your IMEI with the boarding pass info. I believe that in the UK police use some middle-man towers, which name I have forgotten, to collect as much data as possible.
Downloading GPS assist data obviously isn't, and plenty of phones use wifi scanning as a way to augment GPS position fixes, but this seemed a strange callout. Am I missing something?
It's very hard to fight a big nefarious system. Especially with the democratic backsliding of the last few months in the US, it's starting to seem like a better bang-for-your-buck is to ensure the system shares your values, i.e. politics.
That's not to say technical approaches don't remain important, but even most encryption is still based on the idea that someone can't just cut off your fingers until you reveal something that satisfies them.
I don't think so! Cloud rot also affects tracking servers, ad-serving servers and pre-installed apps. A phone that is never updated will, in a few years, be affected by the cloud rot and most of it's tracking will stop working.
The best burner phone is the oldest second-hand phone from a flea market that can still connect to the phone network.
> SIM rotation: Rotating SIMs manually or using PGPP eSIMs changes your IMSI, though your IMEI stays constant.
So then, why rotate them? If one phone is known to be yours, then each SIM inserted into it is known to be yours, and any other (burner) phone that SIM gets inserted into will also be known to be yours.
Pair each SIM with only one burner phone and there will be no record of a connection between them, unless they're connected to the same tower and moving at the same time.
> Do not share your email, phone number, or ID with carriers or clerks when activating service
Not possible in Europe. Buying a SIM card requires an ID.
There were simply too many possibly related videos on the Rob Braxman Tech channel to determine which one you might mean. Do you have a recommendation?
Here's his channel for folks who are new to his content:
This one's a good overview where he references his own deeper dives into the tech details. Disclaimer he's selling his own de-googled phone but he's transparent about it
Are satellite phones under the same microscope as cell phones? Are they broadcasting on all the different cell/wifi/bt frequencies or do they just connect to a satellite? Are they GPS tagged?
Also if you want one-way “location less” communication, the old alphanumeric pager network is still available.
I think those messages are simply broadcast across the network (which at least in the US is national). There’s evidence of a message being sent, none about whether it was received or where it was received.
Movies make it seem anyone can walk into any store in a trenchcoat and walk out with a burner phone ready to go. I get the service part (you can buy prepaid SIMs in cash). What about the phone?
The phone part is easier in many places. I've personally bought both a phone and SIM card in cash from a corner store in SF. I was asked to provide some legal information for the SIM, but they pointedly did not look at my ID or anything, so I was free to write whatever I wanted on the order form. They told me only the SIM required the info, not the phone.
You could have also just bought a T-Mobile SIM and then activated a pre-paid plan with just credits you buy with whatever you want. You can get them for cryptocurrency as well on a lot of places.
Cash is likely tracked too these days, if you get it from an ATM for sure, or maybe it is for some modern tills. So learn to busk before you think about buying a burner phone.
While I like the sentiment of the article, I think most people are not aware of how hostile baseband firmwares are implemented on most SoCs that phones come with. Usually the cell tower handshakes that make you trackable can't be put off, meaning the modem will run in sleep mode even when you are in airplane mode (which is kinda funny considering the dangers of air travel, right? Right?).
Are there actually smartphones without an IMEI and with a Wi-Fi card only, preferrably not a Broadcom one?
meaning the modem will run in sleep mode even when you are in airplane mode
AFAIK this is not true at least for the Mediatek 65xx and early 67xx platforms; I've analysed the firmware and hardware on those. They actually power off the modem and rest of the RF system when in airplane mode. The modem only boots up and starts searching for a signal when you take it out of airplane mode, which is why it takes a noticeable time (10-30 seconds, depending on how many bands are enabled) to get a signal. If your phone goes from airplane mode to having a signal and immediately capable of calling, then I suspect it's one where the modem is not truly turned off.
I haven't inspected Broadcom, Qualcomm, or Spreadtrum in any detail to say whether they do things differently.
Are there actually smartphones without an IMEI
Look for a "tablet" or anything else without the word "phone" in it if you just want a touchscreen portable computer. An IMEI is obligatory to connect to cellular networks, in much the same way as a MAC address is to Ethernet and WiFi.
As far as I remember, the whole 'turn off your phone on a plane' was just a precautionary measure and is not a real technical problem nowadays.
My memory is that it was necessary at the time when lots of people started taking phones on airplanes because the wiring/navigation wasn't shielded against a transmitter that might be actually inside the aircraft.
Since then, plane electronics are better insulated making it less of a problem.
How would that be different for trains? Trains would have similar numbers or more devices, moving at a similar speed (for high speed trains compared to planes at take-off/landing).
Can you please give any sources? While it sounds plausible and interesting it's nothing more than a wild conspiracy theory without some background information.
Buy a broadcom smartphone. Turn bluetooth off, and set it to airplane mode. Then Bluepwn your device, with bluetooth turned off.
Funny how airplane mode didn't work.
That's just one of the quirks. Baseband and what qualcomm is tracking is way worse.
I recommend buying an old Motorola Calypso device and fiddling with osmocomBB, you can DIY an IMSI catcher pretty easily. And you'll be mind blown how many class0 SMS you'll receive per day, just for tracking you. Back in the days you could track people's phones remotely but the popularity of HushSMS and other tools made cell providers block class0 SMS not sent by themselves.
Baseband SoC running their own OS independent from Android/iOS and staying asleep (while still listening for incoming signals) is very much no longer in conspiracy theory territory and more an established fact now. I don't have the source at hand but it's in one of the standards. And the purpose is very clear: LEA like Interpol must be able to locate any IMEI at any point if in tower range, regardless of the power state of the "main" OS
I feel like any article on burner phones that glosses over acquisition with "buy phone and service in cash" misses the point.
Buying a phone anonymously is much harder than "just cash". Most places demand name & address for sign-up, and if you're unlucky want to see an ID.
You really should think through where and how you buy, how to find the "off the back of a truck" places, where to get SIMs, how to pay for renewal in untraceable money and without a CC, etc.
eSim erodes privacy? Well, that sucks, because how long until Apple, Samsung, and Google decide the Sim slot should go the way of the 3.5mm headphone jack?
When I was working at EFF, I started writing (but never finished) a couple of essays along the lines of "the degree of trackability of mobile phones is an unfortunate accident, and we should fix it".
It basically comes from routing requirements (especially to receive incoming phone calls) combined with billing requirements (to make people pay for their connectivity) combined with the empirical requirement to see which base station a device is connected to, and which other base stations can see it at a given moment.
If you aggregate all of that data, then you know a (geographically moderate-resolution) complete history of where almost all people have been at almost all times, and patterns of their habits and whom they probably recurrently spent time with.
Not all of this data has to be collectable, because these things could be disaggregated by introducing different protocol layers. For example, you could pay the mobile company for data connectivity, but use cryptographic blinding mechanisms so that it doesn't know which specific subscriber obtained connectivity at a particular place and time. (Those blinding mechanisms could be implemented inside of SIM cards, so the SIM card's task is to cryptographically prove "I am a SIM card of a current paying subscriber of carrier X" rather than "I am SIM card number 42d1b5c0".) You could have device hardware IDs be ephemeral rather than permanent. Actual messaging and call services could all be "over the top" (as phone industry jargon puts it), provided by people who are not the phone company itself.
This disaggregation is a straightforward improvement from a privacy point of view because it prevents companies from knowing things about you that they didn't need to know in order to provide services.
Meanwhile, in the world we live in, we see governments trying to make it harder to make phones less trackable, by putting legal restrictions on changing hardware addresses, or requiring legal ID in order to establish service. I imagine that an additional cryptographic indirection layer in SIMs to prevent carriers from linking a permanent identifier to a network registration (or specific data use) would also be banned in some places if it were invented.
This shouldn't be inevitable. One thing that made me think about this was when there was a little scandal (which I was a small part of) about companies tracking device wifi MAC addresses for commercial purposes. There was a little industry that would try to recognize people and build commercial profiles based on recognizing that the same device was present (in fact, at the time, even if it didn't actually connect to the wifi -- because a typical wifi-enabled mobile device was sending broadcast wifi probe packets that included its MAC address). So Apple was like "this is a bad use of MAC addresses, which only exist to distinguish devices that happen to be on the LAN at the same time, and perhaps to allow network administrators to assign permanent IP addresses to specific devices", and they made iPhones randomize wifi MAC addresses for some purposes, mostly fixing that particular issue.
We could think just the same way about GSM networks: "these identifiers exist for specific protocol reasons; using them for device or user tracking is an abuse that should be mitigated technically".
Stellar reasoning.
Did you ever get to the point of hypothesizing good ways to align incentives to make this happen? It is hard to tell (having not thought much about it) whether this is a “smart well meaning engineers need to make new standards” problem, a “we need to harness the power of corporate greed problem,” or something else.
I seem to remember a discussion here on HN a few years back about a paper which outlined ways to decouple technical identifiers from personal identifiers on mobile networks.
My memory is a bit hazy but maybe it was the whitepaper for PGPP[0] that OP mentioned?
[0]: https://invisv.com/pgpp/
I don’t think it’s possible to align incentives in favor of rolling out such a statement in the US without another coup.
isn’t detailed information about the user equal to additional billing power? perhaps the only disincentive that exists to having that information would be such overwhelming risk/liability that it would outweigh the profit potential of having it in the first place. it seems to me the relative incentives have reached a oretty stable equilibrium…
> combined with billing requirements
There's a certain flavor of US libertarian that complains that they should only be taxed for exactly the road-surfaces they personally use in proportion to how much they use them.
In response, I like to point out to them that their dream of "fair billing" can't occur without a nightmare of surveillance, making it easy for the government (or road-owners, and indirectly the government) to track and remember everybody's movements in excruciating detail.
Is that worth it? Perhaps a "sloppy" billing system (e.g. fuel/mileage taxes for roads) is actually an extraordinarily good deal in terms of the privacy we take for granted.
There's a potential family of cryptographic methods where people prove that they paid for things without revealing who they are.
https://www.eff.org/files/eff-locational-privacy.pdf (2009)
The technical paper mentioned is now at
https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/blumberg/vpriv.pdf
(I guess Andrew Blumberg moved from Stanford to the University of Texas.)
There might be an inherent tradeoff where you need at least one of {tamper-resistant trusted meters, at least slightly noisy measurements, potential deanonymization}. For example, the short paper mentions that "point tolls" are easy to make anonymous using any form of anonymous digital cash (or blinded tokens issued by the tolling authority!), but the exact usage billing you mention people wanting is much more detailed than a point toll like that. It might indeed be inherently impossible to get all the way there without detailed surveillance.
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Agreed, I always think that all these taxes should indeed just go through fuel. Want a bigger, heavier, more polluting car? Want to drive like a F1 driver? Fine, you pay more. Want to drive a long distance? You'll pay per distance*car_size. Want to go electric? You'll pay tax on electricity in concordance with it's economic price and influence on the planet.
One problem in the EU is is that this would need to be rolled out across the EU, because we already have large difference in price ranges for fuel leading to weird situations neer the border.
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I don't see the issue?
Get on a toll road, pay for a ticket, done. Drive on a normal road, pay for gas, done.
I guess you could make it extremely specific, but then the problem isn't the surveillance, but the price of the cost analysis of driving 1,7 miles on a road in bumfuck nowhere with a J lbs vehicle, exerting X pressure on the road at a standstill going at [Y] speeds, thus generating Z total pressure over time H. In addition the road was I% wet due to rain the day prior.
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Thanks for sharing. I figured it is extremely difficult to spoof or disaggregate the data by ourselves, given the SIM tracking wifi tracking thing basically 7/24, or is there a way to fix it?
I have no technical knowledge about these, and being cryptocurrency related there will be lots of exasperated huffs, but there are a couple of alternative mobile network related projects: World Mobile and Helium.
World Mobile claims 99% coverage of the US, although I think it uses existing networks where there's no native coverage.
They're "interesting", but only early days, and I don't know how close they come to what you describe for privacy and opposition to data aggregation. Large-geographic-area comms coverage isn't something that there's ever going to be a lot of options for.
I was imagining mobile operators that cooperated to some extent with the changes I was proposing, or at least didn't obstruct them. If it's using existing GSM protocols, the IMEI would have to be rotated frequently (and it's not that obvious how to do that without making the connection between the old IMEI and the new IMEI apparent), and the SIM technology would have to change. (What it's trying to prove in a privacy-friendly communications system is more like subscriber entitlement, not subscriber identity!)
There's also the "netheads and Bellheads" theory from the 1990s which can be taken to say that phone companies would never make technical changes to make themselves collect less data, or to be less helpful to government surveillance. Sometimes I think this is right. I still remember how I took part in a meeting with a mobile phone industry association or industry consortium of some sort about a year before the Snowden stuff. Someone on my side said "so, let's talk a bit about surveillance issues", and someone on the other side replied "sorry, that's something we don't talk about". Imagine an industry meeting with privacy advocates where the industry people are completely precommitted to not talking about surveillance!
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I absolutely understand the sentiment and the goals that citizens should, by default, not be tracked. However, how do you square that with the proof, time and again, that truly secure and encrypted networks are primarily use by criminals (drug/human traffickers, and plenty of other people) who, through their trade, make the world a shittier place for the rest of us?
If we accept that the right to privacy is real, that not being followed, watched, and monitored every hour of my life, is something democratic societies should strive for:
Why do criminals have more rights than I do?
That's very easy to square by just accepting that people are allowed to have private communications.
That's only the case because the truly secure and encrypted networks are not the default.
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Your reasoning is so biased that it is hard for me to wrap my head around it, but at the same time it's very common because it confuses the tool with the crime. Criminals use cars and phones, too, but we don't ban them for everyone.
The argument ignores the catastrophic cost of the solution: destroying privacy for all of us. Creating a backdoor for police doesn't just hinder criminals; it makes everyone's data, from journalists to your medical records, vulnerable to hackers and abuse.
I believe we stop crime with good policing, not by building a system of total surveillance that sacrifices the very freedom we're trying to protect.
But this has been "squared" already. Can the police enter your home without a warrant? No? Why? I bet criminals are pretty secretive around their stuff too, no?
I'm unconvinced that secure communications is the bottle neck when it comes to criminal prosecution. We can expand police power without sacrificing our communications like that.
Anecdotally, take a look at China where privacy doesn't exist and yet Chinese syndicates are responsible for a major chunk of the issues you've listed. So clearly lack of privacy doesn't even correlate with decreased criminal behavior.
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This is the "witch hunt" problem.
If you have two networks, one encrypted and one not, and the unencrypted network is significantly easier / cheaper to use or has better network effects, that's where most people will naturally flock. The only ones who will put in the effort to use the encrypted one are criminals and a few principled technologists / civil libertarians. In such a world, the mere fact of using the encrypted network is suspicious in itself.
We define "criminals" here as "anybody the government doesn't like." In the US, this is mostly child predators, drug traffickers, thieves, and maybe a few (legal) sex workers. In other places, this is mostly homosexuals, human-rights activists, journalists and the opposition.
The way to fix the "witch hunt" problem is to make all networks encrypted and secure.
While cryptocurrency is mostly used by criminals, as the traditional financial system is just good enough for most people, TLS is used by everybody, as it is just the default way to do things on the internet nowadays. This is despite the fact that TLS makes wiretapping criminals' communications much harder.
The US and Europe[1] should use the influence they have over standards bodies to make prosecuting the latter group of "criminals" much harder, recognizing that this comes at the expense of also letting some criminals in the EU/US sense of the word run free. It is just the morally right thing to do.
[1] I mostly mean American and European companies and organizations which participate in the process of standard setting, not governments, which mostly cannot do things for complicated political reasons.
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So get ready to be legally bound to leave your front door unlocked because some people store stolen loot behind locked doors!
Better remove the locks on your house and bathroom and set up a public webcam while you're at it. After all, I'm not sure you're not a criminal, and to be sure of that I — and the rest of society — need to be able to observe you in your bathroom.
"innocent until proven guilty" exists for a reason.
> However, how do you square that with the proof, time and again, that truly secure and encrypted networks are primarily use by criminals
Do you have a URL for this proof?
(If it's true, that would be good to know.)
Me and the government have slightly differing opinions of what a "criminal" should be. I am a gender outlaw in many states
You ready to drop encryption between you and your bank?
... They said, on a forum where everyone is posting and reading using connections encrypted by TLS/HTTPS.
I don't see how you've become a criminal just because you don't want somebody in the same coffee shop to see what you're posting or browsing.
Is it fine because it's not "truly" secure? How secure is so secure that it crosses the line and becomes evil?
It’s quite easy to square: your argument is nonsense through and through, barely deserving an iota of rebuttal. I could justify absolutely appalling invasions of privacy with what you’re saying.
We are not beholden to ruining everything for almost everyone to stop a small fee from doing bad things. It’s not any more complicated than that.
This is nonsense. By your logic me and the majority of people using Signal are criminals.
As the other commenter mentioned please provide proof for these hyperbolic claims.
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One thing I didn't see covered is to never have your "real phone" and your "burner phone" on you (or in the same location) at the same time while powered.
Easy enough to say "Gee...these 2 phones are always together or nearby when activated" or "this phone shuts off right before this one powers up".
Although, I suspect there are a few other ways to determine identity easier. Such as tracking the device identifier and then looking up nearby public facing cameras.
So many online services use the proximity of phones to determine things like related persons and related accounts. Facebook is notorious for this. In one building I lived at Facebook would constantly show me the names of everyone coming in and out as "You might know this person" even though I had no idea who they were.
Airbnb as well, at least in principle, if not in implementation.
Airbnb Is Banning People Who Are ‘Closely Associated’ with Already-Banned Users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34983871 March 2023 (119 comments)
h/t HN user dmitrygr
I have no idea how this isn’t illegal. I’ve experienced the same horrifying loss of anonymity before. People I met long ago and definitely do not want knowing my real name showing up as Instagram suggested friends.
Or people who stay next door at an Airbnb and I had a quick chat with in person, like I didn't give them any contact information nor did they give me theirs so how ...
Also, never power up or down, or switch in or out of airplane mode on your burner while at home (or work). Cellular network disconnection and connection events are rare and hence notable.
Isn't buying a SIM traceable by itself? if for example the shop has CCTV recordings or the email where you got the eSIM
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I am not sure I agree with this. I don't think that running out of battery or rebooting a phone is that rare.
But more importantly, if these events are noticeable and Alice does what you suggest she is probably going to highlight her location. Especially if she naively waits till she is 15 minutes from home to switch her burner on. Over time there will be a circle around her house of no burner phone network attach events.
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"If you're going to keep your phone in a bag of potato chips, then keep your phone in a bag of potato chips" --Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) Carl the T800.
I Thought the point of burner phone is you destroy it immediately after you finish business with it.
In many countries you need a valid government ID document to activate a mobile service which means burners do not really exist in those places.
Unless you bought a pixel, graphene’d it and then paid a homeless person to activate a pre-paid data only sim which you would top up with vouchers paid in cash and used a von and international voip service…
A lot of effort though
Silent link esims are quite good for getting your phone to work on any country or network. I have one, not for privacy but more for better phone coverage and it works pretty well. No ID and you pay in crypto - btc/monero etc. (https://silent.link/)
For me the main use is that I'm on o2 in the UK, but if in some dead spot with no signal I can flip the sim settings and connect via EE or whatever.
>For me the main use is that I'm on o2 in the UK, but if in some dead spot with no signal I can flip the sim settings and connect via EE or whatever.
Why not just get an EE SIM if that's your main use?
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Are you able to select which mobile network you use? At least in the US the price for tmobile is about triple that of att so it would be pretty hard to predict your spend if it switches between them without warning.
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> which means burners do not really exist in those places.
This is very wrong. In Germany you can go to any shady kiosk in a big city and buy a pre activated SIM card invariably registered to some Arabic or Pakistani name.
You can buy it in cash. Completely untraceable if you take care of CCTV.
Going to buy a prepaid SIM registered under an arabic name in europe is probably the safest way of getting traced by a government
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IMEI + cell tower triangulation easily makes it traceable. If the authorities want to find you, they can.
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Just track the hardware. A couple of days of normal usage and should be able to assign a 99% probability on you being the owner of that phone.
You should never turn on your burner in a place where you use your regular phone, duh.
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I was surprised when a SIM I purchased on Amazon was not only able to connect in China but was also able to bypass the great firewall. I wonder how these travel sims get round the government regulations.
It's because the government regulations only apply to Chinese citizens. My first trip to China was back in the '00s, and I went for work. I was also surprised to find that my home SIM worked just fine there without any interference from the Great Firewall.
Roaming works somewhat unintuitively from what you'd expect. You do indeed connect to the local mobile network, but all of your data traffic is tunneled back to your home wireless provider's PoP. I realized this once I checked what websites I was visiting saw as my public IP address, and it was an address from a network in Texas!
So China's Great Firewall can't actually inspect or block your traffic while you're traveling, and using roaming on your home mobile network's SIM. It's all sent over the equivalent of a VPN to your home soil before going out to the public internet. This iswhy latency can be pretty bad while roaming.
They bypass the firewall precisely because they're roaming SIMs. Their internet connection goes through the home operator.
I imagine they simply don't allow selling such SIMs in China. It would be extremely easy to track and flag any that were e.g. used for longer than a few weeks.
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It's how data roaming works in general -- it's tunneled through to the SIM's home provider. Conversely, a Chinese SIM roaming overseas is still subject to the Great Firewall.
They just don't enforce the exact same restrictions on roaming users. I suppose there are risks of tourists spilling the beans, so to speak, they just don't view that as a severe unmitigated risk.
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True on the Government ID document but most of the times the portal to activate would allow for any sort of numbers as long as it was in a proper format - whether or not it was valid.
These allow for self activation, have a lockout of 5 failed attempts or so and can be done via sim card codes (not SMS, but you interact with a program on the simcard and low level carrier services.)
> In many countries you need a valid government ID document to activate a mobile service which means burners do not really exist in those places.
Buying prepaid SIMs from tourists or foreign students returning home is a reasonable easy workaround for that - at least if you're the sort of person who meets and befriends those sort of people.
At least where I live tourist SIMs are restricted to 2 weeks, then need to be converted to a local SIM (with ID requirements).
And anyone leaving would have their immigration status expire and the SIM is turned off then unless you provide some other proof of residence.
Seems like an excellent business model for the homeless.
How does GrapheneOS help in that?
It doesn't specifically help with obtaining a SIM without presenting ID, but it does help make it easier to avoid later leaking your true identity to Google/Apple/etc. once you start using the phone.
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If you need to communicate with people in your area and not be tracked; MeshCore software with LoRa hardware like the this https://lilygo.cc/en-ca/products/t-lora-pager is something to consider. Text only, completely offline
If you need to do this then start by figuring out why you need to do it, and adjust your approach too your threat model.
Because the most significant evidence we have lately is that in-person meetings or dead drops and other low tech means are how you avoid being tracked.
Turning on any sort of radio transmitter is just turning on a big flash light into the sky.
Turning on anything relatively uncommon is even worse: normal people have cellphones and use them. They don't use LoRa devices, there aren't a lot of LoRa devices and someone who only uses LoRa devices will stand out in any dataset.
> Because the most significant evidence we have lately is that in-person meetings or dead drops and other low tech means are how you avoid being tracked.
How many cameras did you just go by? did you have your cell phone on you? how many networks did it connect too? how many bluetooth broadcasts did it passively send out? Not being tracked and being in public are slowly becoming an untenable duo.
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Yes!!! I've been wanting to make something like this for a long time. But unless the firmware is open source I wouldn't trust this for anything secure. But this looks like a dev kit so I can do whatever I want.
There are other alternatives https://meshtastic.org
It's mostly open source. https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore They have a couple minor things that are paid features.
Except that your texts go out to everyone on the mesh network.
Almost like ethernet, if only there were a way to fix that
MeshCore has verified public key sharing; see what happened to the other network at defcon. Direct messages are encrypted.
These look pretty fun, have you played with them much? What kind of range can you get?
I’ve tried them on snowmobile trails. With the vegetation the range was about a mile.
Range can be 100+ miles though if you can establish line of sight. Depending on the scenario, a high elevation repeater could give several mobile devices pretty significant range.
Range is line of sight. If you can see it, even if 100 miles away, odds are it'll work. Seattle area has one of the better networks for MeshCore. Tacoma to Vancouver BC is the range for semi reliable messaging
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Or just ham radio (not anonymous though)
And illegal to obscure/encrypt: http://www.arrl.org/part-97-text
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Kudos to this article for:
1. starting with threat modeling (though they don't call it that);
2. mentioning that your OPSEC affects not only you but also people connected to you; and
3. mentioning that maybe you should just leave the device at home (because it's basically a surveillance machine that you pay for).
(A more common article format would be to unload a pile of supposed security&privacy measures without putting them into context, and wouldn't properly set expectations for what that gives you. Neither of which is very helpful, and can be very counterproductive.)
> Buy phone & service in cash
Step one is already difficult here in Australia: to do so you must hand over your personal details and ID. At least that was true for anything with a SIM card for sale back in the 2010s
So the “step 0” was “find a retailer who didn’t follow the rules”, and they’d usually be a corner store selling handsets or SIM cards by the bucket load to all sorts of interesting characters
This was already the case in Australia as early as 2003. I distinctly remember being shocked that I had to provide ID when I bought a phone from a store for the first time.
> Strong PIN, not biometrics
And also be aware of "shoulder surfing", which is different today in 2 ways it wasn't in the past.
In the past, the risk was something like someone looking at you type in your PIN on a bank ATM, or maybe your password on an computer keyboard.
Today, shoulder surfing is mainly different in 2 ways: (1) near-ubiquitous high-resolution surveillance camera networks, which can be places/scale and capture images that humans practically didn't; and (2) with machine learning, they don't even need to see what buttons you press, only see movements of your arm.
(Randomizing button positions on a touchscreen can help, and also help fight forensics like traces your fingers leave for where they touch. But randomization means you need to be able to see your screen, which reduces the ways you have to hide your screen from the view of others.)
In addition to surveillance cameras and video of movement, AI can also determine what keys your pressing on a keyboard of an airgapped computer, merely by the sounds you make when you type
Shoulder surfing is exactly the risk factor that biometrics are meant to mitigate.
Every time you type your PIN - that's an opportunity to snoop it.
Neither will protect you against rubber hose cryptography.
This post has an obvious rewritten-by-LLM smell to it. That's okay and increasing common but it's giving me a kind of funny feeling with regards to the content which I'd like to examine more.
Firstly, What's the current opinion on using third party LLMs by the infosec community? Secondly it's more philosophical: do activists on the ground embrace this new tech or fight against it? Or is it an amoral tool, like what a phone is considered to be? Is there a distinction between the big third party APIs and local on device use?
(If it helps, the feeling is a bit like a seeing a Linux developer use an Apple mac for development)
The Dumphone Finder (https://josebriones.org/dumbphone-finder) referenced there is useful, too, if you need to get a phone a 90 year old person has a chance of being able to use.
I have the feeling that whenever you are on an airport (and maybe railway stations too) they cross your IMEI with the boarding pass info. I believe that in the UK police use some middle-man towers, which name I have forgotten, to collect as much data as possible.
You are probably thinking of a stingray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker
> Radios off (GPS/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth) unless needed
GPS is a passive technology, no?
Downloading GPS assist data obviously isn't, and plenty of phones use wifi scanning as a way to augment GPS position fixes, but this seemed a strange callout. Am I missing something?
They mean turn it off so that apps on your phone can't read your location.
if the phone is confiscated it could be saving GPS automatically, i guess
This stood out from me as odd from the article too, but that's definitely a plausible explanation.
I could easily see a phone with some sort of location tracking saving GPS data points internally until it can reach a network again to send them out.
Always remember the three Cs of OPSEC (credit to grugq): compartmentalisation, cover, and concealment.
Most OPSEC failures are due to leakages which is a failure of compartmentalisation.
It's very hard to fight a big nefarious system. Especially with the democratic backsliding of the last few months in the US, it's starting to seem like a better bang-for-your-buck is to ensure the system shares your values, i.e. politics.
That's not to say technical approaches don't remain important, but even most encryption is still based on the idea that someone can't just cut off your fingers until you reveal something that satisfies them.
> Privacy Tips for All Phones:
> Keep device & OS as updated as possible
I don't think so! Cloud rot also affects tracking servers, ad-serving servers and pre-installed apps. A phone that is never updated will, in a few years, be affected by the cloud rot and most of it's tracking will stop working.
The best burner phone is the oldest second-hand phone from a flea market that can still connect to the phone network.
> SIM rotation: Rotating SIMs manually or using PGPP eSIMs changes your IMSI, though your IMEI stays constant.
So then, why rotate them? If one phone is known to be yours, then each SIM inserted into it is known to be yours, and any other (burner) phone that SIM gets inserted into will also be known to be yours.
Pair each SIM with only one burner phone and there will be no record of a connection between them, unless they're connected to the same tower and moving at the same time.
> Do not share your email, phone number, or ID with carriers or clerks when activating service
Not possible in Europe. Buying a SIM card requires an ID.
Mental Outlaw and Rob Braxman on youtube have more comprehensive overviews on how to get burner phones
How to Get a Private Phone, Number, and Cellular Data - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaHWcttD0tM (Mental Outlaw)
There were simply too many possibly related videos on the Rob Braxman Tech channel to determine which one you might mean. Do you have a recommendation?
Here's his channel for folks who are new to his content:
https://www.youtube.com/@robbraxmantech
This one's a good overview where he references his own deeper dives into the tech details. Disclaimer he's selling his own de-googled phone but he's transparent about it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I9bFIrFhDs
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The guide recommends PGPP to rotate IMEI numbers, however, the service shut down more than a year ago. https://invisv.com/articles/service_shutdown.html
I wish the article you linked wasn't so thin on details:
> Unfortunately, due to technical issues outside of our control, we have to shut down our subscription services.
Are satellite phones under the same microscope as cell phones? Are they broadcasting on all the different cell/wifi/bt frequencies or do they just connect to a satellite? Are they GPS tagged?
Also if you want one-way “location less” communication, the old alphanumeric pager network is still available.
I think those messages are simply broadcast across the network (which at least in the US is national). There’s evidence of a message being sent, none about whether it was received or where it was received.
Just a note, Android and iPhones have abysmal security once police have physical access after first unlock (AFU) once your phone is rebooted.
https://blogs.dsu.edu/digforce/2023/08/23/bfu-and-afu-lock-s...
yeah, a phone that has been unlocked after boot is easier to get into one that hasn't...
Is there any sim you can buy internationally without an ID? Here you need an ID.
In Mexico you can buy prepaid SIM cards with cash, and without an ID, at convenience stores such as 7-11 or Oxxo.
That's far, but good to know.
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In The Netherlands you can buy prepaid sims without any kind of identification.
UK you don't need ID and can pay in cash. They'll ask for your name and address but you can make it up
> Buy phone & service in cash
Movies make it seem anyone can walk into any store in a trenchcoat and walk out with a burner phone ready to go. I get the service part (you can buy prepaid SIMs in cash). What about the phone?
The phone part is easier in many places. I've personally bought both a phone and SIM card in cash from a corner store in SF. I was asked to provide some legal information for the SIM, but they pointedly did not look at my ID or anything, so I was free to write whatever I wanted on the order form. They told me only the SIM required the info, not the phone.
You could have also just bought a T-Mobile SIM and then activated a pre-paid plan with just credits you buy with whatever you want. You can get them for cryptocurrency as well on a lot of places.
phone get it from a used devices place so it already has someone else's footprint
> in cash
Cash is likely tracked too these days, if you get it from an ATM for sure, or maybe it is for some modern tills. So learn to busk before you think about buying a burner phone.
What are the latest tips and best practices for acquiring a phone and service without having to deanonymize?
For example, can you just walk into Best Buy with cash?
> without having to deanonymize
> Best Buy
Cameras are everywhere in big box stores. Anonymity is not sold in stores.
Problem is the utility of a phone is mostly in the things that are problematic. Email, cloud etc.
It’s either got too much stuff on it or not enough stuff on it.
While I like the sentiment of the article, I think most people are not aware of how hostile baseband firmwares are implemented on most SoCs that phones come with. Usually the cell tower handshakes that make you trackable can't be put off, meaning the modem will run in sleep mode even when you are in airplane mode (which is kinda funny considering the dangers of air travel, right? Right?).
Are there actually smartphones without an IMEI and with a Wi-Fi card only, preferrably not a Broadcom one?
meaning the modem will run in sleep mode even when you are in airplane mode
AFAIK this is not true at least for the Mediatek 65xx and early 67xx platforms; I've analysed the firmware and hardware on those. They actually power off the modem and rest of the RF system when in airplane mode. The modem only boots up and starts searching for a signal when you take it out of airplane mode, which is why it takes a noticeable time (10-30 seconds, depending on how many bands are enabled) to get a signal. If your phone goes from airplane mode to having a signal and immediately capable of calling, then I suspect it's one where the modem is not truly turned off.
I haven't inspected Broadcom, Qualcomm, or Spreadtrum in any detail to say whether they do things differently.
Are there actually smartphones without an IMEI
Look for a "tablet" or anything else without the word "phone" in it if you just want a touchscreen portable computer. An IMEI is obligatory to connect to cellular networks, in much the same way as a MAC address is to Ethernet and WiFi.
Phones with MediaTek basebands are able to change their own IMEIs. Do with this information what you will.
As far as I remember, the whole 'turn off your phone on a plane' was just a precautionary measure and is not a real technical problem nowadays.
The risk was that mobile networks could not handle moving many devices from one cell to another at high speeds (during takeoff and landing).
As far as I remember, the whole 'turn off your phone on a plane' was just a precautionary measure and is not a real technical problem nowadays.
My memory is that it was necessary at the time when lots of people started taking phones on airplanes because the wiring/navigation wasn't shielded against a transmitter that might be actually inside the aircraft.
Since then, plane electronics are better insulated making it less of a problem.
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How would that be different for trains? Trains would have similar numbers or more devices, moving at a similar speed (for high speed trains compared to planes at take-off/landing).
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You might be looking for an android based Media player device.
But they are likely not ideal for the use case...
Sony BRAVIA
Are there actually smartphones without an IMEI and with a Wi-Fi card only, preferrably not a Broadcom one?
Maybe an old iPod Touch that can still run a VOIP program?
Can you please give any sources? While it sounds plausible and interesting it's nothing more than a wild conspiracy theory without some background information.
Buy a broadcom smartphone. Turn bluetooth off, and set it to airplane mode. Then Bluepwn your device, with bluetooth turned off.
Funny how airplane mode didn't work.
That's just one of the quirks. Baseband and what qualcomm is tracking is way worse.
I recommend buying an old Motorola Calypso device and fiddling with osmocomBB, you can DIY an IMSI catcher pretty easily. And you'll be mind blown how many class0 SMS you'll receive per day, just for tracking you. Back in the days you could track people's phones remotely but the popularity of HushSMS and other tools made cell providers block class0 SMS not sent by themselves.
This wiki article is a nice overview: https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Dete...
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Baseband SoC running their own OS independent from Android/iOS and staying asleep (while still listening for incoming signals) is very much no longer in conspiracy theory territory and more an established fact now. I don't have the source at hand but it's in one of the standards. And the purpose is very clear: LEA like Interpol must be able to locate any IMEI at any point if in tower range, regardless of the power state of the "main" OS
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I feel like any article on burner phones that glosses over acquisition with "buy phone and service in cash" misses the point.
Buying a phone anonymously is much harder than "just cash". Most places demand name & address for sign-up, and if you're unlucky want to see an ID.
You really should think through where and how you buy, how to find the "off the back of a truck" places, where to get SIMs, how to pay for renewal in untraceable money and without a CC, etc.
Ah sweet a schizo thread
eSim erodes privacy? Well, that sucks, because how long until Apple, Samsung, and Google decide the Sim slot should go the way of the 3.5mm headphone jack?
That has already happened. iPhones since the 14 don't have sim slots.
Rubbish!
I have an iPhone 16 and it has a sim slot.
only in US.
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