I could've been more clear :) don't think I could engage in prevention without violating some FCC laws. But in general, yes - prevention > detection > awareness > ignorance.
that's what i would do, just leave the phone at home. Bring a camcorder and post your social media engagement dopamine hit when you get back home. No need for constant connectivity, people protested pretty effectively in the 60s before cell service even existed.
No phone actually stands out a lot in real life surveillance systems and will very quickly get you a bunch of additional attention because it’s so unusual.
Not usually that I’m aware of as a single data point in any system but if there are other reasons to thing you’re trying to act surreptitiously you are going to be very close to the top of the list of people of interest.
There’s a lot to be said in 2025 for appearing uninteresting to anyone who might be watching.
So where is the burner phone kept? It can't be kept at your home - you have to assume its location is being logged. So you have to purchase and store it somewhere besides your house. You can't use your car to purchase it or store it, so you need a bike. On the day of the protest you need to charge the burner phone away from your car or home and then bike to the protest.
Is this too extreme? How expansive are the queries theyre running on these identifiers? Are they running algos to detect burner phones based on the highly anomalous activity patterms described above?
It's becoming common practice for protesters to store their phones in faraday bags. I don't think "no phone" would stand out as much as you think it would.
If you rotate burner sims you are probably mostly fine but yeah with enough effort they can do a larger geo analysis with the IMSIs. Only IMSI (the sim id) is in the clear on LTE afaik so you might be okay if you are not otherwise of interest.
Just turning the phone off and wrapping it tight in aluminum foil is almost certainly better.
They can and do have the ability to MITM traffic though. There is not anything to stop someone with the hardware from doing it and everyday that passes it seems the rules matter less and less.
Sim swapping seems easy to detect based on anomalous patterns. And it's not a question of effort. If the data is there to allow links to be made, an algorithm can be designed to make those links. Then it's zero effort.
This is dumb advice that doesn’t match any kind of realistic threat model. It’s like something you saw in a movie I think.
The entire modern game is very literally, don’t be interesting and don’t do weird shit that normal people wouldn’t do. It’s a needle in a haystack problem so don’t go and start creating a really weird signature of whatever it might be: behaviour, communication, RF emissions etc. The anomaly is the signature and has been for about 20 years now.
So are you in the “no phone at protests” camp? Because it’s impossible to attend a protest and “act normal” because by definition you’re engaging in abnormal behavior and that’s exactly why they’re logging all the phones there
> So where is the burner phone kept? It can't be kept at your home - you have to assume its location is being logged. So you have to purchase and store it somewhere besides your house
You can remove the battery, put it in a Faraday cage and charge it turned off (or in another device/out of one). It can be on only when you need it.
There’s no information or evidence about any system capable of detecting someone without a phone being in use today. You’d have to combine multiple technologies to do it, and while it might be technically possible the details go beyond any known current systems.
What on earth are you talking about… that is not even a little bit true. I think you’re over complicating this in your head quite a bit.
Here’s something [1] that’s was public almost 20 years ago at this point. Things have advanced a lot since then. I don’t think you quite understand just how much of a pipeline there was for this kind of technology that went almost directly from quite classified SIGINT stuff in the GWOT to casual LEO / domestic stuff.
I know the whole no phone thing sounds like a real high speed operator move but it’s very literally a signal they go looking for when trying to sift through large amounts of data.
They can detect the presence of phones, yes. But that doesn’t automatically mean being able to detect people that aren’t carrying phones. To do that, you’d need to integrate the phone detection data with some other source of data on people present in the area in question. I’m saying there’s no evidence of such a system actually being used in practice. The paper you linked doesn’t address that at all.
Btw, to help understand the technical challenges involved with this, the whole reason Tesla focused on vision-only for its self-driving was the difficulty of integrating sensor data from multiple sources, e.g. lidar + vision would be significantly more difficult to achieve. It’s not that this isn’t possible in theory - it’s just that there’s no evidence of anyone having done it for “lack of phone” detection, and that’s probably because it’s not really a requirement that’s in high demand.
I’m not looking to argue with you here. You can take the advice or leave it but I will leave you with one quick tale to say that around the late 90s / early 2000s employees at GCHQ used to have a rule that when they were on their way to work they had to turn off their phones when they were I forget exactly how far but something like 30km of arriving to work.
They realised that technology had changed for them even that long ago that all it was doing was just making a really clear signal for the opposition as to who they were and that they were someone interesting.
I think the advice you have is very literally decades out of date.
If you have an hour or two to kill I’d recommend taking a look at this for a real no bullshit modern way of thinking about this problem space: https://youtu.be/0_04-lTu2wg?feature=shared
i’m not sure about this approach - what about in the event of apprehension or some other means of physical access to the device? biometrics can (sometimes) be used even if the authenticator is unconscious.
I’m explicitly making the argument that you should act as though your phone (and any other devices) can and will be searched by someone at the most inconvenient point possible and assume that that search isn’t necessarily tied in any meaningful way to you having your phone on your person and go from there.
Because that 1000% is a real capability you will have to deal with and like sure, do what you can to make the costs associated with that as hard as possible but don’t get confused into thinking it’s a technical solution that is going to fix this problem.
Fully patched iOS in lockdown mode isn’t going to save you from someone physically making you open it in front of them.
I'm listing the Times of Israel first as it's an Israeli publication, though it cites the following NY Times article which researched the story:
"Targeting Iran’s Leaders, Israel Found a Weak Link: Their Bodyguards"
Despite all the precautions, Israeli jets dropped six bombs on top of the bunker soon after the meeting began, targeting the two entrance and exit doors. Remarkably, nobody in the bunker was killed. When the leaders later made their way out of the bunker, they found the bodies of a few guards, killed by the blasts.
The attack threw Iran’s intelligence apparatus into a tailspin, and soon enough Iranian officials discovered a devastating security lapse: The Israelis had been led to the meeting by hacking the phones of bodyguards who had accompanied the Iranian leaders to the site and waited outside...