[JdeBP]

> If you carry a cell phone, it tells Big Brother where you are.

It's worth remembering that if one carries a mobile telephone, and it is not fully powered off, TPC always knows where you are, and the powers that be do not need to go to Apple for that information. A mobile telephone broadcasts to let the world know where it is, and the mobile telephony system only works in the first place if the system knows how to route incoming calls and SMS messages to a person's telephone.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215636

[pbalau]

> the mobile telephony system only works in the first place if the system knows how to route incoming calls and SMS messages to a person's telephone

Like every other messaging system. Because you know, in order to send a message you need to know where...

[jstanley]

Not quite. Ricochet IM[0] is a messaging system based around Tor hidden services. The entire purpose of Tor is the ability to route messages to people without finding out where they are.

[0] https://ricochet.im/

[ex3ndr]

Tor is power hungry and can’t scale for billions of users.

[chimneypool]

the Dystopian Orwellian Nightmare is even worse than what Stallman is saying here. First of all, one of the most critical top secrets (ab)used by NSA against us in the Snowden cache has been kept secret from us.

in the Wiretap Act of 1968 (Title III), it explicitly defined what is a wiretap and who is authorized to perform them and what the legal procedure is. if you read the Wiretap act in the most literal fashion, you will conclude that Title III applies to any communication device which is connected to a network via a physical wire, such as a landline telephone.

https://it.ojp.gov/PrivacyLiberty/authorities/statutes/1284

would you like to know what NSA's interpretation is of the Title III? well, you can't, because it's Secret Law. but I'll give you a hint: cell phones don't connect via wires, therefore, Title III does not apply, therefore NSA can just "read the air" any damn way it pleases, and it doesn't have to tell you, nor tell a Judge, nor tell anybody. NSA just does it. NSA records the entire radio spectrum going over the air. technically, it's not a "wire" tap, since there is no wire. the closest i recall this little legal loophole fib almost coming out during the peak of the Snowden leaks was when (traitor neocon) Sentator Wyden was challenging the NSA in open hearings by giving hints that the NSA was spying on the GPS locations of all cell phones in the US. but nothing ever came of it, Wyden never followed through with leaking any documents nor holding a public hearing.

if you have any doubts, just read the NSA AURORAGOLD slide deck:

https://search.edwardsnowden.com/docs/AURORAGOLDWorkingGroup...

i don't even know what "IR.21" is, some kind of telco protocol thingy like SS7, but NSA targets it and surveils it on every "Mobile Network Operator" (MNO) on the planet. Slide 10: "We Monitor the Industry." NSA spies on the GSM Association in Switzerland. NSA spies on the entire technical staffs of every "MNO" on Earth.

scroll towards the end of the slides where there is a map "network coverage." the whole fucking world of cell phones is "covered" by NSA surveillance. notice anything funny about the map? the US and most FVEYs countries are orange, meaning 1%-20% wireless "coverage." but Africa, inner Asia, and desolate countries are green, which means over 80%.

gee, that's funny. why would NSA's "wireless collection" be so much higher in countries who are marginal American allies and all of whom are rapidly developing economies which went from pre-industrial agrarian, to skipping over industrial, which means they never built a national phone network of wires, and skipped straight to national wireless networks.

it means NSA basically data rapes wireless. it is infinitely easier for NSA to spy on wireless than wired.

but wait! it gets worse. you may ask yourself "okay, fine, NSA steals the air, but i'm a hacker and by flying spaghetti monster i can come up with a technical counter measure. i will develop my own decentralized system to defeat NSA as the global passive adversary."

a few days or weeks later, after you study Mixnets and Meshnets and Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) and RFC 5050 and after you start prototyping your own off-grid Internet, you come across this slide from the Snowden leaks:

Moving Data Through Disconnected Networks

https://search.edwardsnowden.com/docs/MovingDataThroughDisco...

you slap yourself in the forehead.

shit. NSA has already covered new forms of sneakernets too. of course they have. undetecable decentralized sneakernets are the perfect method of exfiltrating all of the data which NSA is stealing from everyone else in the world, and doing it using their own private off-grid network is ideal because nobody will notice exabytes of your data being siphoned through your fleet of "smart" e-lighbulbs used as a hop point back to Bluffdale.

those NSA slides about DTNs are from around 2011, and it clearly shows NSA had several DTNs operational. they even had a partner program with NRO to develop "CubeSat" nanosatellites to act as nodes in their global exfiltration DTN. and if we know one thing about NSA it's when they're 10 years ahead of everyone else in inventing new defensive tactics, they also invent the offensive tactics to attack that defense, in order to cripple anyone else who might use the same weapons. so of course NSA already has ways to destroy DTNs, in order to prevent anyone else from gaining an advantage over NSA. remember "NOBUS"? Nobody But Us.

[chimneypool]

as a final bonus, about halfway through those slides about DTNs, there is a map showing an NSA "mobile wireless testbed."

you HN nerds outta recognize that map. look familiar? see the Lat/Long coords at the bottom. it's the Richmond district in SF. you'd think NSA would be careful to not use US locations as the examples in its surveillance programs, since NSA is not chartered for domestic spying. but you'd be wrong.

'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

[craigsmansion]

> "We're an empire now [..]"

An exceptionally well written and chilling quote I thought. I looked it up to see what book or potentially movie/series this might be from:

"Karl Rove. American Republican political consultant and policy advisor."

How can creative writers possibly compete with this caliber of actual villain dialogue?

[krapp]

Ah yes, Karl Rove. The Grima Wormtongue of the Bush administration. The man who used "reality based community" as a pejorative, and led the American right towards its current embrace of "post truth" ideology.