[mdhb]

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.

[therobots927]

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.

[yinznaughty]

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.

[therobots927]

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.

Sounds like "no phone" is the winner

[mdhb]

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.

[therobots927]

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

[mdhb]

I think you can still go to a protest with a phone just fine honestly.

The fact that there are a lot of people there is actually the strength of it.

I’d probably think carefully about what you want to use it for and what I had on there though. I wouldn’t recommend bringing a device with a a bunch of incriminating evidence to an event like that.

I think a good threat model is just operate on the assumption that maybe someone stops you and asked to look at your phone. Go ahead and also assume that they will ask at the most inconvenient point in the day also. Act accordingly and I wouldn’t anticipate much in the way of trouble from having one.

Also, look at it through the eyes of the opposition, what are their goals here…

1. Fix the signal to noise ratio in a crowd

2. Identify people

3. Map out networks

And your goal is to not to be “invisible” (you can’t anyways) but to be uninteresting. They aren’t the same thing and the difference is important.

For the overwhelming majority of people I don’t think there is much yet to worry about in simply attending a protest (Assuming you’re a citizen and you act sensibly because otherwise that’s an entirely different threat model and you probably shouldn’t be there at the moment).

But I would leave you with this bit of advice also… they very much want you to think they are the all knowing, all seeing and ever present 50ft tall enemy. That isn’t true. There is also no shortage of people who really seem to get off on pretending things are more dangerous than they really are but that shit turns into paranoia real quickly and then people become terrified to do anything or you start making bad decisions. Fight both of those things when you run into them.

You can and should feel good about getting out in the streets at the moment, it’s not going to get easier the longer it goes on just be sensible.

[542354234235]

>For the overwhelming majority of people I don’t think there is much yet to worry about in simply attending a protest (Assuming you’re a citizen and you act sensibly because otherwise that’s an entirely different threat model and you probably shouldn’t be there at the moment).

That seems a tad naive. I think being recorded by local/Federal agencies at a protest, especially one critical of current government actions, is a legitimate concern. Especially since those tools are being brought out specifically for the protest, not because they are looking for some murderer that happens to be a block away from you.

Also, the word "yet" is doing a lot of work there. Considering that data can be stored indefinitely with little oversight, there is little to stop police from searching through the database and looking for "targets of interest" like phones that showed up to multiple protests.

Being at a protest is already known to make you interesting, which is why those tools are being brought out in the first place, why police are "friending" protest organization FB pages to gather membership data, etc. Keeping yourself out of databases that could be used later to jam you up is reasonable. There is also no way for police to tell who has a phone and who doesn't at a protest, so you aren’t highlighting yourself anymore by not bringing your phone (or turning it off), unlike say wearing a mask and sunglasses to reduce facial recognition visually highlights you.

[therobots927]

Thanks, that was a very thoughtful comment and you basically read my mind, in that I have become so paranoid that I’m afraid to go to a protest. And I can definitely see how that plays right into their hand. I think there is definitely a lot of room for messaging like yours because it seems like now many are becoming aware of the surveillance situation which is good but at the same time can result in a form of learned helplessness.

[tpxl]

> 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.

[antonvs]

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.

[mdhb]

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.

[1] https://www.pnnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_re...

[antonvs]

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.

[mdhb]

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

[antonvs]

In a tightly targeted situation like entering the GCHQ building, sure. Because it’s essentially a target-poor environment with a known point of interest that possible targets are visiting. Those constraints make the problem much simpler.

But the OP article is about a Stingray operation covering 30 blocks, and other discussion in this thread is about protests such as the anti-ICE protest which gathered cellphone info from the protestors. In those kinds of environments, if you don’t want to show up on surveillance, you’re much better off not carrying a phone.

Being more specific, this comment of yours is not supported by evidence:

> 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.

But, if you’re getting your information from videos like the one you linked, I can see why you have these beliefs.

[mdhb]

It’s very clear that you just started thinking about this topic in the last hour but for some reason you’ve got a real unearned confidence in what you’re saying.

I have very good reasons to know what I’m talking about here but again, I’m not here to argue with you.

[boston_clone]

fwiw, that video does describe a threat model for more casual individuals, but does describe some overall good protections mentioned elsewhere (e.g. lockdown mode). the guest also does tacitly admit that the government is much more like the eye of Sauron, and is a wholly different beast.

[boston_clone]

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.

[mdhb]

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.

Think something a lot closer to this xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/538/

[MandieD]

Dreh dich nicht um, schau, schau… Der Kommissar geht um, oh oh!

Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?