[icameron]

When I first heard the advice to ditch your phone when you go a protest, I thought maybe that's a little extreme. But it's a real threat. We already knew post Snowden there is an extensive big brother apparatus. We saw post 911 that all rights can be taken away in the name of counter-terrorism. Now with a government that's operating outside the law and labeling peaceful protesters as terrorists, I don't think we can rely on telcos to protect our identity. The mass surveillance will fingerprint a device, and the telco will know your name so it's not at all an extreme precaution to ditch your phone.

[embedding-shape]

Basically: if it has a modem in it, it can be used against you in some way. Phones, routers, cars, public signs, cameras.

It's been so turbulent lately, that it's hard to register events that would have blown our minds if so many things didn't also happen around the same time. Remember when Israel made a bunch of pagers explode indiscriminately across Lebanon and Syria? So many things going on, one worse than the other, that it is hard to stop and really consider the implication of these single events fully.

[ActorNightly]

Its important to not be hyperbolic in these times.

The two technologies ICE uses rely on permission for apps tonuse geolocation data for advertising purposes. Same reason you start seeing ads for local things when you travel.

Technically they can subpoena cell records to see which towers your phone connects to, but this is not viable for multiple people.

For privacy, if you care, having a rooted degoogled phone with no sim card is sufficient enough. You can check its signature by using your laptop as a IGW and capturing traffic to see if any apps or services ping anything.

If you want off grid comms, meshtastic devices are very nice, me and my wife use LilyGo Tdeck pluses for comms and finding each other at festivals. The portable modems are also nice because you can use them for GPS for your phone vs built in location services.

[buran77]

> phone with no sim card is sufficient enough

It's most certainly not. Phones connect to a cell tower even without a SIM to make emergency calls. The phone can still be tracked and it's not a difficult leap from there to identify the owner of the phone.

[embedding-shape]

Strikes me as almost negligent to say to "not be hyperbolic" and then completely downplay exactly how they can track you in the real world.

[beecasthurlbow]

That may be true for this specific use case, but the protection on bigger services could be easily rolled back. E.g., law enforcement was able to ask Google for "tell me everyone who was in this specific area during this time" [0] and is still able to ask "give me everyone who searched for a specific term" [1].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/08/google-to... [1] https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/16/are-there-fourth-amendm...

[soco]

Nevertheless, it's eerie that we are even having this discussion today. I didn't say "scary" because I'm far away from these events, but definitely uncomfortable - I know, the "events" may approach sooner or later my location too...

[AndrewKemendo]

There’s millions of people who have been dealing with this daily for the last few decades. The sim swap networks and VPN/TOR users across the world live like this.

When I was in Iraq it was basically expected that all of your communications are totally pwnd, if you live in China you’re totally pwnd.

Cell trackers like described in the article have been in use for the last 15 years by police and law-enforcement inside the US.

why you think its eerie?

[muwtyhg]

> why you think its eerie?

You typed out how awful the situation is, and how you cannot trust anything, and then ask why it's eerie? I feel like you answered your own question before you even asked it.

[AndrewKemendo]

It’s only eerie if it isn’t common

[baggy_trough]

Indiscriminately?

[embedding-shape]

Yes, seemingly so. I guess we'd have to wait for full investigations to conclude before saying for sure, but sure looks like it.

> “To the extent that international humanitarian law applies, at the time of the attacks there was no way of knowing who possessed each device and who was nearby,” the experts said. “Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities."

> “Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/exploding-pa...

[lobf]

I mean, who else is using a pager in Lebanon? That's not a tool a normal consumer uses, it's only used by people to evade phone surveillance. I think it sounds like a high probability that anyone receiving one of these pages in Lebanon is part of Hezbollah.

[embedding-shape]

> I mean, who else is using a pager in Lebanon?

But they can impossibly actually know who physically has the pager next to them, when they're triggering them. This is the "failing to verify each target" part.

[baggy_trough]

That's not a very realistic standard for a wartime covert operation.

[lobf]

Is this a SoP in wartime?

[hnaccount_rng]

I mean in the case in Lebanon they knew. They sold those pagers to Hezbollah.

[potato3732842]

They only discriminated to the extent to which the specific product they went after correlated with the people they actually wanted to kill.

[standardUser]

The locations of the detonations were indiscriminate, the intended targets were not.

[daheza]

If we all ditch our phones then how will we record the abuses of power?

[ActorNightly]

Hate to break it to you, but people just simply dont care as much as you think they do. We have the right to own firearms for the purposes of protecting us against tyrany, but thats pointless when we cant even realize tyrany right outside our door.

[noncoml]

This shows how flawed the idea is that individual gun ownership protects people from a rogue government. Acting alone with a firearm does not stop tyranny. It only leads to prison or worse.

Real resistance to authoritarianism has never come from isolated individuals using violence. It requires organized collective action where people stand together and refuse to comply. History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.

Owning a gun by itself does not meaningfully protect anyone from government overreach. Organization solidarity and collective action do.

[mothballed]

A single gun is useless yet when a deranged asshole used it against children it stopped ~200 cops for 77 minutes. What a wild world we live in.

Are police more incentivized to protect a nebulous state than literal children who live in their same town and who are under their charge? If so I hope we are figuring out how to fix that.

[ActorNightly]

The big problem is, everyone is so very attached to their comforts in their daily lives that its a big cost for anyone to resort to violence.

This is why I am hoping that Trump will go through with fascist takeover of US, because at a certain point, the economy is going to tank, and then when people start actually hurting, then there will be way less on the line to lose.

[microtonal]

Examples like Russia show that it's too late at that point, the grip of the state will be too large. Protestors just disappear in prison camps.

By the way, violence is not necessary at all. A large general strike is enough, when the whole economy comes to a standstill and stocks start to crash, the oligarchs are going to get worried.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.

I'm having trouble coming up with many recent examples where non-state resistance to authoritarianism succeeded in defeating it, regardless of method. Myanmar? Hong Kong? Xinjiang? Iran? North Korea?

[mothballed]

Non-state actor YPG fought off ISIS authoritarians and held off Assad authoritarian in Kurdish Syria.

[tjnaylor]

Honduras leading up to the 2021 elections was able to oust an authoritarian president Juan Orlando Hernandez (the same recently pardoned by Trump) through peaceful protests - mostly targeted at blocking major roadways between cities with burning tires. This was a sustained campaign over months, I don't see US citizens as prepared for something like that honestly, but logistically that's a recent example that came to mind.

[noncoml]

Rosa Parks?

[potato3732842]

Having the capacity to do credibly threaten violence back acts as a check on abuse because nobody will stand for cops occasionally getting clapped over stuff they should never have been doing in the first place.

Look at how cops roll up on "is armed because you can't not be at his level" drug criminals. There's reconnaissance, preparation, checklists, etc, etc. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's generally orders of magnitude more professional than the sort of slapdash thuggery ICE is up to. And it's also much more expensive so they don't just target it at entire demographics, they prioritize.

While it's not a silver bullet. Being able to make credible threat of taking one or two of them with you really does force the government side to behave better, maybe not categorically, but enough to matter.

A nearly identical "force them to do better" argument applies to being able to film police, open records, and many other things.

[Teever]

I've had similar thoughts for a while now.

As it is between the guns, radios, helicopters, and digital surveillance crrupt members of law enforcement knows that reprisal against their corruption by the general public is difficult if not impossible.

The second someone uses a drone to take out a blatently corrupt cop who received a paid vacation as punishment for murder the dynamic will change completely.

[mothballed]

I mean look at Bundy V1. Law enforcement did not want to die over a few cows, so they said fuck it. Bundy (senior) is still grazing his cattle on that land to this day.

Law enforcement is not any braver than you or I, if they don't have overwhelming firepower they fall back on their first commandment which is "the policeman goes home safe to his family at the cost of absolutely everyone else including defenseless children."

[thunderfork]

Look at the MOVE bombing, etc - if they wanted to glass the Bundys, they would have. Safety wasn't the reason they didn't.

[kazinator]

> It requires organized collective action where people stand together and refuse to comply.

... armed with guns and prepared to use violence.

[beej71]

I have an old point and shoot (20x optical zoom) and a SIM-free phone that has never been used in my name for anything.

[tonyarkles]

> SIM-free phone

Is the modem completely disabled? Does it still show the "SOS" option that allows you to call 911 without a SIM? If so, and if it's ever been turned on in your residence, there's a decent chance the IMEI could be traced back to your house just based on pattern-of-life movement.

[gruez]

That's why you also need to enable airplane mode.

[kazinator]

Which you can just engage on your current phone.

[bmicraft]

Airplane mode often leaves bluetooth on, with all the tracking that enables.

[steele]

Analog recording and viewing may need to become the state of the art given how low the bar has become to manipulate digital media

[dylan604]

great news! this old shoulder mount with a strap mounted VHS recorder will finally be able to come out of storage and find a new life! /s

not sure why you feel analog recording is necessary. just need a camera that isn't part of a phone. any DSLR, MFT, Mirrorless cameras would be just as good.

however, there's something to be said about live streaming so that even if the camera is confiscated the images are already publicly available.

[steele]

I don't disagree with you about the encumbrance and impractically, but the live streaming providers could eventually become unreliable or compromised in a number of ways (genAI, political pressure, advocacy for an agenda of its leadership)

[pavel_lishin]

Burners, which you never bring anywhere near your home, and which you do not drive your car to pick up.

[lapetitejort]

Point and clicks with no internet connectivity. Practice unloading and reloading SD cards in came someone comes to destroy evidence

[dredmorbius]

There are inexpensive dedicated still and video cameras, for as little as $40.

Higher-quality devices will still cost markedly less than a flagship, or even several-years-old smartphone, and will have much greater lifespan absent misadventure.

[kazinator]

- Use a different device: tablet, or camera.

- Do bring your phone, but put it into "airplane mode" so that it doesn't talk to any cell towers; then upload the video somewhere as soon as you get out of the area

[gruez]

Phone on airplane mode and with location services disabled?

[therobots927]

I doubt that would do anything…

[gruez]

Is there any evidence that "NSA can turn on your phone even if they're off" or "location toggles on phones don't actually do anything" conspiracy theories are true? Even if the NSA has such capabilities, is there any reason to believe that they'll burn it to go after some ICE protester? That's the type of stuff you'd save so you can use it to go after bin laden, not burn on some run of the mill protester.

[plagiarist]

Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.

The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.

[gruez]

>Why would they be burning anything? They find you with the exploit and then use parallel construction to make arrests.

Same reason they don't burn 0days on low level drug dealers. The risk isn't that they have to reveal in court that they used some backdoor, it's that indiscriminate use of a backdoor eventually leads to it being discovered by security researchers.

>The location toggle does nothing to prevent your carrier (and by extension your government) from determining location from cell towers. If you trust there is no remote exploit, the minimum would at least include turning off cellular signals.

I specifically mentioned airplane mode in my previous post.

[tavavex]

But those comments weren't just about location - everyone knows that triangulation based on cell towers is a viable option as long as you're connected to some. But they also claimed that airplane mode, which is supposed to disable most communications modules in your phone, including the cellular modem, would be ineffective at doing that. To me that seems to reach into "the US government can remotely turn your phone on" and similar kind of theories.

As for burning - if they really possessed these extra special exploits that allowed monitoring of even supposedly disconnected or disabled devices, each instance of its use would expose them to a slim, but nonzero chance of that exploit being discovered, especially if it required communicating with that phone directly. In this situation it would be wise to limit the use of this to actually important targets, to avoid revealing their advantage by using these unconventional methods (as opposed to normal cellular, wifi or GPS-based tracking) on random protestors.

[ranger_danger]

why not?

[codingdave]

Buy a camera. And/or an audio recorder. Or pull the SIM out of an old phone and use that.

[pengaru]

I wouldn't assume pulling a SIM is enough to hide the phone's location. The modem will still be powered, the IMEI isn't part of the SIM card and is a unique identifier. Plus last I checked you can still contact 911 without being a subscriber.

I'm no expert on cell networks but my impression is the baseband will still ping towers and participate in the cell network on some level. If the phone gets confiscated or its IMEI otherwise associated with you, it can probably be abused to try place you in an area at a given time even without the SIM card.

Just use cameras without any RF hardware. (they tend to have better optics / zoom capabilities anyways)

[jacquesm]

A phone with its SIM out is still registering with the network.

[kazinator]

... and has an IMEI identifier.

[jacquesm]

Yes, and that's usually directly traceable to who the phone was first sold to.

[kazinator]

Or to the subscriber who last registered it to a network with a SIM, even though the SIM is not there now.

[fsflover]

Librem 5 phone has a hardware kill switch for the modem. The camera is not so great though.

[pklausler]

Disposable film cameras and FRS walkie-talkies, I think.

[dredmorbius]

FRS: family radio service, a broadcast communications technology, TIL:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Radio_Service>

[layer8]

There are standalone pocket cameras.

[everdrive]

People have allowed themselves to become so dependent on mobile phones that I'm frankly disgusted. You're talking about a scenario where you're worried about being illegally arrested by the secret police -- aided by their tracking of your phone, but it's still not enough to consider using your phone less. It's no different that a rat starving to death but continuing to push the lever for the cocaine hit.

[edit]

Vote me down all you want. If a bulletin went out that said "we're going to use your phone to steal your children and torture them" you'd have people saying "but, but .. how am I going to do my banking and check my messages." It's the height of absurdity.

[chasd00]

yeah it's kind of amazing, just leave your phone at home and the tracking problem is solved (if one even really exists to begin with). If you want to document something bring a simple digital camera. They pretty much all have video and audio capability too. Like how is this not obvious to everyone?

edit: just want to point out there are still cameras everywhere so if you're worried about being found just leaving your phone at home isn't going to do much

[SilverElfin]

Being able to upload or stream is crucial so evidence doesn’t get confiscated

[8note]

id just bring my phone. if the secret police are going to arrest or kill me, theyre going to do it either way, probably while im there.

if i bring a phone, i can at least document the secret police's actions, and make friends and get contact info for other people that are there.

security by obfuscation isnt particularly good, and its a state level threat.

there's a different absurdity with your child torture example - that youd be ok with children being tortured over phone usage. the bulletin and the people doing the kidnapping at torture are the problem, not the phone. there's a third option of stopping said torturers, and youll likely want your phone as one of the tools in doing so

[chaps]

....cameras exist :)

[daheza]

True, cameras can be taken away or smashed after the fact destroying evidence.

With my phone I can stream video to a cloud so that it can't be deleted. The ACLU used to have an app specifically for this but it seems to have been discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_Mobile_Justice

[iamnothere]

If you are ok with the low quality, you could use a radio to transmit fast scan TV to a nearby receiver. Use a repeater if you need to get some real distance.

FPV drones often use this and could be a good source of parts. Or encode the feed and send through a small portable ham radio if you want a challenge. https://irrational.net/2014/03/02/digital-atv/

[chaps]

Sure, just be careful not to fall into the trap of technosolutionism.

[Ccecil]

I have an Eye-fi SD card which can send photos via wifi. Wouldn't be too hard to make a receiver that send from a raspi or something automatically.

Seems they are discontinued but there are other options that work similar such as "EZ Share"

[chasd00]

the world isn't perfect, you do what you can. Just take a small RunCam or something and keep in it your pocket and be discreet when you're using it.

[nickthegreek]

whenever this topic comes up, I like to point people to EFF's Rayhunter.

https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter

> Rayhunter is a project for detecting IMSI catchers, also known as cell-site simulators or stingrays. It was first designed to run on a cheap mobile hotspot called the Orbic RC400L, but thanks to community efforts, it can support some other devices as well.

And

https://bitchat.free/

> bitchat is a decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over bluetooth mesh networks. no internet required, no servers, no phone numbers.

[CGMthrowaway]

Half the country learned this after January 6. The other half is learning it now, apparently.