Ask Slashdot: How To Bypass Gov't Spying On Cellphones? 364
First time accepted submitter jarle.aase writes "It's doable today to use a mix of virtual machines, VPN, TOR, encryption (and staying away from certain places; like Google Plus, Facebook, and friends), in order to retain a reasonable degree of privacy. In recent days, even major mainstream on-line magazines have published such information. (Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, had an article yesterday about VPN, Tor and Freenet!) But what about the cell-phone? Technically it's not hard to design a phone that can switch off the GSM transmitter, and use VoIP for calls. VoIP could then go from the device through Wi-Fi and VPN. Some calls may be routed trough PSTN gateways — allowing the agencies to track the other party. But they will not track your location. And they will not track pure, encrypted VoIP calls that traverse trough VPN and use anonymous SIP or XMPP accounts. Android may not be the best software for such a device, as it very eagerly phones home. The same is true for iOS and Windows 8. Actually, I would prefer a non cloud-based mobile OS from a vendor that is not in the PRISM gallery. Does such a device exist yet? Something that runs a relatively safe OS, where GSM can be switched totally off? Something that will only make an outgoing network connection when I ask it to do so?" And in the absence of a perfect solution, what do you do instead? (It's still Android and using the cell network, but Red Phone — open sourced last year — seems like a good start.)
Disposable cell phone (Score:5, Interesting)
Flooding (Score:5, Interesting)
The NSA needs to be flooded with false positives. They need to have so many false positives generated that their illegal, unconstitutional spying is rendered moot.
On the other side, we need to surveille every member of Congress and the Executive and have their every move published on a publicly available site. After all, if they have nothing to hide then they shouldn't worry, right?
In a perfect world the President and every member of Congress who signed off on this unconstitutional behavior would be impeached. But I know this is not a perfect world. So instead I will advocate a world where we turn the panopticon on itself and make them suffer three times for what they make us suffer.
Tyrants must always be hoisted on their own petards.
what makes you worth tracking? (Score:1, Interesting)
say the NSA is tracking 500 million people worldwide
do you really think that there is a guy sitting in the NSA tracking you for no reason? out of all the tens of millions of people? what makes you so important?
its like the idiots who think the supermarkets are tracking them personally with the loyalty cards. stores want aggregate data and purchase bundles to do loss leader promotions. they really couldn't care what you buy personally
it was already said the NSA does the same. they think some muslim street vendor or cab driver is sending money to fund the jihad, they see who he is calling and so on. to build data on possible people in a network.
Umm (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Disposable cell phone (Score:4, Interesting)
The last place you want to be is where you are only caught by the traps they set up for the really dangerous people
You assume that this is only about really dangerous people. We just had weeks of controversy about the IRS targeting people for political motives. Are you so naive to think that won't happen at the NSA?