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.)
Don't play.... (Score:5, Informative)
The only way to win is not to play...
Or, buy a new handset and phone number for every call and only pay cash.
Re: (Score:3)
Sign language. The US government is short of interpreters, especially for cell phone intelligence.
Re:Don't play.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't play.... (Score:5, Funny)
I see that you're pointing to the sky, friend. Are you trying to tell me something?
I want to believe.
Re: (Score:3)
And don't call anyone with, because the NSA is also monitoring all the incoming activity at the other endpoint of your call and can very likely deduce your identity that way.
Re: (Score:2)
And I could only assume that they have the technology to deduct to at least some degree of accuracy the identity of a person based on voice. If not, it will come.
Re: (Score:3)
this is not what he meant.
It is very easy to analyze the identity of the caller by just nabbing the other side, unless the other side is also using a disposable cell phone.
This is how police capture thief of stolen phones.... by contacting people who have been called from those phones.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? When the ANI (calling number) along with the ESN is changed after each call? I think that would throw off all but the most diligent of investigators. They would have to have a voice tap on the dialed phone (which requires a fully blessed search warrant and not just a FISA kangaroo court approval) to do any kind of speaker identification. You *MIGHT* be able to infer who the speaker is though the handset location, but that implies you have some kind of previous knowledge about locations. My idea
Re: (Score:2)
How about
Re:Don't play.... (Score:4, Funny)
NSA: "We'll have to be able to attach our own piece of string to yours if you wanna keep using that, sir"
Disposable cell phone (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
That's an easy loophole to plug: just require registration to buy a phone. It is that way in Germany, I think.
Re:Disposable cell phone (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell in the US they can't even keep non-insured non-licensed drivers off the road. Registering phones? Hah!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Cars don't require a connection to centralized infrastructure.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Disposable cell phone (Score:5, Insightful)
Brian, I assume you paid in cash.
Do you know how much information the Staples inventory system has? Does it store things like the phone's Mobile Identification Number? It certainly logged the time the phone was sold and the location, perhaps flagging your cash transaction. Hopefully you smiled at the various cameras in-store and in the parking lot that recorded you driving up and buying the phone. ;-)
Re: (Score:3)
Brian, I assume you paid in cash.
Do you know how much information the Staples inventory system has? Does it store things like the phone's Mobile Identification Number? It certainly logged the time the phone was sold and the location, perhaps flagging your cash transaction. Hopefully you smiled at the various cameras in-store and in the parking lot that recorded you driving up and buying the phone. ;-)
Buying with cash is definitely important.
I almost brought up the same point about the cameras, but then I realized that if the goal is to keep broad surveillance from tracking him, cycling through disposable phones will do this unless Staples is turning over security camera footage to the NSA for facial recognition.
If the phone was used to commit a crime, the government could probably track it back to him through security camera footage, but they aren't going to be able to track his past few years of moveme
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
pay some kid $20 to guy buy the burn phone/SIM for you. What kind of tradecraft master or wanna-be actually goes and buys their own burn phone?
Re: (Score:3)
Hopefully you smiled at the various cameras in-store
Or wear a baseball cap and hoodie. Preferably with a full beard. And an a heavy foreign accent.
Re: (Score:2)
So you pay 5 extra bucks to get the illegal immigrant hanging out at the home depot next to staples to buy it for you, or send in a kid.
Re: (Score:2)
Here are some problems with that:
- Did you pay with a credit/debit card? If so, that shit's logged.
- Did you modify your appearance to foil the likely Internet-connected security camera watching the cashier? If not, evidence of your purchase is available there.
- Did you take the car you normally use to the store? If not, it's possible parking lot security cameras have identifying information on you, including a license plate number.
- Cell phone towers are at least capable of logging the towers and RSSI of
Re:Disposable cell phone (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. The idea of a burn phone is a very old one now. If you think that the NSA doesn't have contingencies to deal with that, you are mistaken.
Honestly, unless you really do expect to be doing something illegal, the NSA doesn't have the resources to actually analyze the material they get from everyone for all possible illegal permutations. Unless you have reason to believe you are being targeted, the very fact that you use a burn phone regularly is probably more likely to set off red flags than just your normal use of a possibly monitored phone.
Think about it this way. The use of burn phones is an inconvenience that most people won't bother with. If you are willing to put up with that inconvenience, you are in a relatively small group of people who are either refusers, or people doing illegal stuff. If I were the NSA, I'd be more interested in you as an evader, rather than less. And if they do happen to be able to track burn phones, you've just promoted yourself from Potential Terrorist, Second Class to Potential Terrorist, First Class.
When it comes to panopticons, what you really need to do is learn how to hide in plain sight. The U.S. government is more like Sauron than God. They see everything, but only if they're looking at it.
Re:Disposable cell phone (Score:5, Insightful)
they have an $80 billion per year budget. That's $255 for every Man woman and child living in this country. They certainly can track every single one of us. Especially considering the Majority of US Citizens aren't even old enough to use a phone or the internet yet.
Re: (Score:3)
Pedant here -- at the 2010 Census, 79.9% of the US population was 15 or older [censusscope.org], which seems like a good age by which most everyone will have a cell phone. So about $322 for everyone 15 and over.
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?
Re: (Score:3)
I'm just advising you to not waste your time trying to make yourself seem safer, only to find that you're actually painting a bigger bullseye on your back.
Sure, someone could target you politically if they have a reason, but going through obvious steps to hide your activity makes it pretty easy to justify trying to find out what you are hiding.
We're all guilty of some crime that's on the books, it's just that no one has the time or inclination to bother with us. However, if you gain their interest, then ma
Re: (Score:3)
Come to think of it, there have been some very peculiar incidents recently.
Supreme court justices changing their mind about which way to vote.
The head of the CIA and other officers resigning because of affairs where the government admits reading their personal email without a warrant.
Journalists being spied on.
Fuck, they caught Elliott Spitzer with that call girl and then couldn't explain how they stumbled on him....
Are you sure none of these incidents involved the illegal spying? The eye of Sauron s
Re: (Score:2)
Staples also probably transmits this information, over the internet, to their home office and to a data storage facility. The TLA folks may not even need to ask Staples for said information.
Re: (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I haven't actually done this, but it seems a lot better than buying phones from staples if you're truly up to something nefarious.
Wait, why? I thought the whole point of this line of reasoning was that you didn't want to be snooped on, despite *not* have anything to hide...
'Obama Phone' Program Has Nothing to Do with Obama (Score:2)
... Obamaphone ... Obamaphone ... Obamaphone ...
The 'Obama Phone' Program Has Nothing to Do with Obama [gawker.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Well, it makes about as much sense as the Liberal "Bush's War for Oil". just sayin
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Disposable cell phone (Score:4, Informative)
and how do you know if a warrant has been issued and executed? You have basically don't have a right to protest a warrant because you don't know it even existed.
And all mail are scanned and the image is taken and stored into a database (presumably the NSA):
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/woman-arrested-for-obama-bloomberg-ricin-letters-687435 [thesmokinggun.com]
Re: (Score:2)
You can still encrypt the message.
And talk to who? (Score:4)
Once you jump through all those loops, who will you be talking to? And if such a person exists, he probably already knows what you are going to say, so why bother calling? :)
Re: (Score:2)
Once you jump through all those loops, who will you be talking to? And if such a person exists, he probably already knows what you are going to say, so why bother calling? :)
that's the thing. if everyone else is already tapped, what's the point. in fact this is how the prez and congress are justifying tapping everyone, because everyone might be called or might call someone or be somehow part of someone elses call network who might be aiding the enemy(so yeah if someone on your call network ever called someone who might have made a call to somali, yemen, iran or whatever country they label as suspicious this week then you're on the metadata list!).
otherwise just getting some end
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.
Rebirth (Score:2)
The NSA needs to be flooded with false positives.
Undead Osama, is that you? Phoenix666 was a bit obvious...
Re: (Score:2)
Flood them with too much data? They can't sort what they have now, but they sure can store a lot And if they start to run low on space, they'll just make Congress fund another yottabyte of storage.
Re: (Score:3)
So in other words, we need to do absolutely nothing. The reality is the NSA already has more data than they can act on. Sure, they can analyze your phone calls and emails and figure out that you're the sort of person who is influential among your friends*... you could be a terrorist leader, or you could be a town gossip. It's far more likely to be the latter, so without more evidence, there's little point in pursuing you.
On the other hand, once you do do something that arouses suspicion, they can use your p
Re:Flooding (Score:4, Insightful)
Wonderful idea, you and a few thousand buddies are all going to crapflood the NSA. The NSA, an organization that is arguably the best in the world at sorting noise from signal. Check your ego at the door and realize your an amateur pretending to play in the big leagues.
Want real change instead of feel good crap that doesn't do a damn thing? Call, or better yet, write your congress critter and demand change.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Might I suggest that you be the first to generate all those false positives? I'm sure you'll have no problem with the black SUV's that show up at your house.
Re: (Score:2)
Gladly, coward. They can show up in all the black SUVs they want. The cameras I have mounted streaming that activity will evoke no reaction at all, I bet.
Umm (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a god damned thing (Score:5, Insightful)
There is absolutely nothing you can do because the government has root for any given phone (if nothing else through a warrant). Own the network and you own anything going through it. Your encryption means jack when their are appliances that do nothing but decrypt and re-encrypt traffic at very high rates of speed. You could get a separate phone just for having private conversations (ala drug dealer). You would quickly find out that they can determine that number (doesn't matter how you got that phone). Once they know that number they can just tap that through the same phone system.
Want some level of privacy and to ensure that the government at least has to get a warrant to read your supposed to be private conversations? Go old school, visit this antique shop called a Post Office and buy a roll of stamps and envelopes. There is well established legal doctrine that says snooping on your mail can only be done with a warrant.
Don't like my answer? Call your congress critter and demand change.
Re: (Score:2)
One thing to note is that Media Mail is an explicit exception for everything. This is because it is by definition only to be used for "media" (books etc) and not for any other purpose. The post office lists very explicitly that there is no expectation of privacy and that they can inspect these packages to make sure that they aren't being used for anything other than media.
Your making the trade off of being able to ship heavy and otherwise very expensive items at a far cheaper rate by declaring that you are
HAM Radio? (Score:4, Funny)
It's waiting for you.
Re: (Score:3)
Encrypted communication on amateur radio bands is prohibited by law in the US, so transmitting an encrypted signal just invites spooks to triangulate your transmitter's position.
Re: (Score:2)
Again, this is assuming that you're up to
Re: (Score:2)
Encrypted communication on amateur radio bands is prohibited by law in the US, so transmitting an encrypted signal just invites spooks to triangulate your transmitter's position.
One could always use Steganography [wikipedia.org].
What can we do? Not much. (Score:2)
Encrypted phones (Score:5, Informative)
There are encrypted GSM phones [cryptophone.de] with end-to-end encryption when talking to a similar phone. They're overpriced and hard to buy, but available. The source code is available so you can see how it works. It's classic Diffie-Hellman 4096-bit key exchange to establish a session key, followed by 256-bit AES encryption for the data.
It's too bad OpenMoko tanked. That was a totally open source phone down to the hardware level. That plus Cryptophone-compatible code would have been trustworthy.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Openmoko is not tanked.
OpenPhoenux project, coming from Openmoko community, may be the answer for all those needs. It has less resources than Openmoko had, as it's done by a small german company Golden Delicious, but thanks to that it makes small moves rather than big and crazy that Openmoko did, so it's less likely that it'll completely fail like Openmoko did.
Old Openmoko Neo Freerunner already was perfect for such purpose, but it's a bit unusable for anyone who's not hardcore geek always being ready to us
Don't bother (Score:2)
If you're going to fight for privacy and rights and puppies and things, then do things toward that goal. Securing your own phone doesn't do that. It just makes work for you. Unless you really do have something of interest to them. Which you probably don't.
Use your efforts to write letters, keep informed so you can vote intelligently, educate people, publish something, or whatever. Securing your own phone is just "I got mine." Worse, it's probably wasted effort.
honestly (Score:2)
Learn and use some obscure foreign language (Score:2)
For sure they will not understand what you say. The more different from English, the better. For example, Arabic is a good option.
Oh, wait...
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
How about British English?
Re: (Score:2)
Navajo. No, wait. That's domestic, not foreign.
Get rid of it (Score:2)
If you want privacy just don't get a cell phone, they are pretty much the most track-able device that people carry day to day.
Redphone, huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Funny how a privacy-oriented app like TextSecure (text app from the makers of Red Phone, mentioned in TFS) wants to access my Device ID, SIM serial number, and Subscriber ID...
Re: (Score:2)
No, there is (probably) not a guy who is tracking you personally. But if/when they decide you're a "person of interest", for whatever reason, they can go digging.
And the supermarket thing doesn't bother me myself but it could result in some embarrassing and/or problematic invasions of privacy if implemented carelessly
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Since they won't reveal exactly what they are tracking or what behaviors might warrant further scrutiny and investigation, how would I know if a guy at the NSA is tracking me? Maybe my purchase history will set off some "terrorist warning" alert and now they are digging through my past history records. Maybe they are going to send the guys in black SUV's to bring me in for questioning to ask me why I made a trip overseas, then made repeated purchases at Radio Shack and Home Depot *and* I turned my cell pho
Re: (Score:2)
say you do buy something that sets off a terrorist warning. chances are lots of other people are buying the exact same thing and setting off the same warning. its impossible for people to manually go through all the data and question everyone. even if they wanted to, they can't just question you for no reason. they just pass the info to the FBI. and they don't have enough people to question tens of thousands of people a year over what they buy. if they really did this it would be all over the internet
that's
Re: (Score:2)
say you do buy something that sets off a terrorist warning. chances are lots of other people are buying the exact same thing and setting off the same warning. its impossible for people to manually go through all the data and question everyone. even if they wanted to, they can't just question you for no reason. they just pass the info to the FBI. and they don't have enough people to question tens of thousands of people a year over what they buy. if they really did this it would be all over the internet
that's why in 2013 we have software that scans this data to find patterns
Right - they use datamining software to look for patterns, They can use very loose criteria that flags a million people, or they can tune the algorithms to tighten the criteria of what is flagged as "suspicious" until only 1000, or 100, or 10 people are flagged, and they'll keep tuning until they have a reasonable number of people to scrutinize and/or question.
Datamining works, but it's not exact - it can pick 1000 people out of 100 million that are likely going to do something, but not with 100% certain
Re: (Score:3)
So someone asks you some questions. So what? If you went overseas, you were clearly fine with not only being questioned by the TSA, but having your personal property searched (without a warrant!) and even having your person scanned or physically scrutinized.
Well actually no, TSA didn't question me or go through my personal property other than an X-ray. US Customs asked if I was bringing back any restricted or taxable items, but they didn't question me about what else I had with me. They didn't even open my checked bag (or if they did, they reset the "opened by TSA indicator" on my lock and replaced the zip-tie on the zippers with another one just like mine.
If the NSA can flag your purchases, it also knows enough about you to know what you are doing with said purchases. So just ignore them (like they are ignoring you).
I'm supposed to be comfortable with surveilllance that is so detailed that not only do they know what I'
Re:what makes you worth tracking? (Score:5, Insightful)
"What makes you worth tracking?"
As the cost of this approaches $0, it's pretty easy to make tracking any given person's life worth more than it costs to do it.
Re: (Score:2)
and what would be the point?
you really think there is some guy tracking you as you walk into a starbucks and yells out to the office, "qzukk is going into the starbucks, we got him"
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
isn't that the whole point of the program?
use data to find people living in the USA who are here to cause us harm in the future?
Re: (Score:2)
isn't that the whole point of the program?
use data to find people living in the USA who are here to cause us harm in the future?
If there were some way to ensure that's what the data is really used for that would be a laudable goal. But there's no way to prevent it from abuses. Maybe next election it will be used to find everyone that's ever contributed to a Tea Party candidate so the IRS can scrutinize their taxes, or maybe to track down everyone that's ever attended a Green Party meeting, or some other political means.
There's a lot of ways the data can be abused (if not by the current government, then a future one), and few ways to
Re: (Score:2)
so how will the NSA fund this? do they have some magic money making machine?
they beg for money from congress like everyone else. there are a few senate and house committees with members from both parties that have oversight of this and they take the money begging testimony in special sealed rooms cleared for classified information
Re: (Score:2)
and what would be the point?
1. automated more efficient and thus more financially profitable marketing and advertising.
2. political persecution. It's hard to get away with an old-school execution style A-list B-list purge, though certainly correlating the accelerometer data of mobile phones with the words on the web page visible at that second makes the list sorting much easier, if you don't care much about some false positives. And you can get your B list down from 50% to 1%, because computer targeting based on aggregated data real
Re: (Score:2)
Sit around collecting dirt on someone long enough, and you will find something that looks suspicious. Then, if you want to smack someone down, legitimately or not, you've collected an excuse to do so.
For example, let's say you'd sent a compromising photo to your significant other when you were 16. 20 years later, you're leading a politically inconvenient trade union, and whoops, waddaya know, all of a sudden you're done in for distributing child pornography.
Re: (Score:2)
Some of us just think it's a bad idea when the NSA can pick a random person on the street and know whether they're cheating on their spouse within two minutes.
Re: (Score:2)
that's assuming there is a guy in Maryland clicking names on a list tens of thousands long to see who is cheating on their spouse, which is impossible and a stupid waste of time.
Did Lindsay Mills think she was important? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Come on /., we can't mod up such a blatant misunderstanding of a technical issue.
Since it's algorithmic filtering, we are all being tracked, just not in a personal, hands on way. Plus, if the data is retained, hey can examine your life with increasing levels of detail in the future. Building a huge database of all this data is even WORSE than tracking, because it enables all sorts of later analysis with increasingly powerful computers and increasingly sophisticated algorithms.
Re: (Score:2)
Two weeks ago, it would have been "yeah, like the NSA is just amassing all of our search and call records." But, since we (the "conspiracy theorists") were right, it's time to change to some new objection. Well, I can't hit a moving target. You are 100% right, that will probably never happen. But, it could. And, there are literally an unbounded number of doomsday scenarios.
It is far more likely that in the future this data will be used to round up even more "criminals" (and, of course, you'll mentally
Re: (Score:2)
> 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
Agreed, the supermarkets are interested in aggregate data. But they also keep the individual purchase data. This came out recently in a food poisoning case where the authorities used loyalty card data to narrow down what food was contaminated and the source (Medscape.com) [medscape.com].
J
Re:what makes you worth tracking? (Score:5, Informative)
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
Bullshit. [forbes.com] Careful who you call idiot, lest you look even more the fool.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
that's still aggregate data. they find out who bought a basket of goods and market to them based on the predictions of past purchases of previous of these items. they don't care what you personally buy, the computer looks at the aggregate purchasing history and automatically creates coupons based on research of what you are likely to buy
its all done by computer. not like there is some guy sitting around and checking out hot pics of your pregnant daughter.
50 years ago they would have blindly mailed out coupo
Re: (Score:3)
Now you are changing what you meant by "personally". Your first post implied personalized profiling. Now you are saying you meant personnel doing the profiling and that it would not matter if the profile is not public.
We are all products of different experiences and have different thresholds for finding things creepy. No need to call names.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm just waiting for the next pin to drop: DEA gets access to help assist the war on drugs.
Re: (Score:2)
what makes you worth tracking? ... do you really think that there is a guy sitting in the NSA tracking you for no reason?
What makes you think collaborative filtering [wikipedia.org] and similar analyses are done one person at a time? The state of the art is done with linear algebra [wikipedia.org] and similar maths, and solves simultaneously for each individual in the sample set.
Re: (Score:2)
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?
If you look at the history of intelligence agencies all over the world, it is absolutely amazing what kind of people they considered "interesting" in the past (e.g. during the McCarthy era): poets, writers, movie-makers, businessmen, small criminals, politicians and political activists of all flavors, scientists, programmers, muslims, christians, outspoken government critiques, intellectuals, ... The list goes on and on. History has proved that these agencies have a pretty broad concept of what's "interesti
Re:Being "spied" on, or drawing attention, choose. (Score:5, Insightful)
The trick is to hide in plain sight. Most of the time if you seem legit and do nothing obvious you're flying below the radar.
Re: (Score:3)
> The trick is to hide in plain sight. Most of the time if you seem legit and do nothing obvious you're flying below the radar.
Hiding in plain sight simply doesn't work when there is a permanent recording of everything you do. You might not trip some pattern detector today, but if you have any proximity to any events of interest then the NSA will be focusing on everything they've ever recorded you doing.
Just look at Snowden - for over a decade he anonymously posted to multiple websites with the usernam
Re: (Score:2)
Which is better, drawing attention to your activity by hiding your communication, which likely triggers a red flag but won't hide metadata, or choosing your words carefully when communicating in any way, shape, or form?
In my case, the first one - My communications really aren't all that interesting, unless you consider "Hey, Honey, need me to stop by the store on my way home?" vital to national security interests. However, if I hide them, it makes the Powers That Be think they are interesting, and thus they will want to spend resources to investigate further. Upon said further investigation, they'll discover that they not only completely wasted their time and resources, but also inadvertently helped me achieve my goal of
Re: (Score:3)
Avoiding attention isn't the point. Simply obstructing the illegal surveillance regime is the point. Any way in which you can resist, you should resist.
Re: (Score:2)
Viva Maemo!
Re: (Score:2)
I just can't stop myself. If you don't have anything to hide you have nothing to worry about.
Do the windows in your house have curtains or blinds, sir? The door to your bathroom - is there no lock on it?
Sometimes (read: most of the time) the desire for privacy has nothing to do with obscuring bad behaviour.
Re: (Score:2)
I just can't stop myself. If you don't have anything to hide you have nothing to worry about.
There, I said it. Here come the downmodders.
Since once the NSA has the data it likely never gets deleted, how do you know if you have something you want to hide from a government 10, 15, 20 years into the future? Are you sure that none of the people or groups that you associate with now won't be deemed an enemy of the state at any point in the future? Maybe some ordinary every day activity you do today will bring you under suspicion in the future, like going to church (or one particular church), or the gun range, or spending time in a Makerspace.
Re: (Score:2)
I kind of feel like I've forgotten my meds this week.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds like you want a phone with
No, it sounds like he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about at all.
Example:
" Technically it's not hard to design a phone that can switch off the GSM transmitter, and use VoIP for calls"
I've never seen a phone that wouldn't let you shut off the GSM transmitter, nobody needs to "design" this it's already there.
I can't speak for iPhones or Windows devices, but with Android you can shut off everything associated with cell phone carrier use any time you want, and install any kind of VOIP client you feel
Re: (Score:3)
I've never seen a phone that wouldn't let you shut off the GSM transmitter, nobody needs to "design" this it's already there.
You really need a hardware switch. Otherwise the OS could just pretend to shut off the radio.
Re: (Score:3)
Bullshit. There's nothing in the Android OS which phones home or anywhere else. Yes, there are some applications which do it, but you can shut those off. And if you're extra paranoid just go install a custom ROM and don't run the spyware applications.
That's absolutely false. If Google Apps are installed on the phone (any stock Android, not AOSP or Cyanogenmod (though you can install gapps)), then background programs will make constant connections to Google. GTALK_ASYNC_CONN_com.android.gsf.gtalkservice.AndroidEndpoint will wake the phone periodically to phone home (despite the name, it's not normal GTalk service, as it persists even if Talk is logged out or completely disabled). If you have "Wi-Fi & mobile network location enabled", a service will p
Re: (Score:3)
How would anyone know without the source code? Even with the source code, it's impossible to prove there's no back door.
Re: (Score:3)
They could have kept mining federated XMPP chats and passing those to the NSA but no, they wanted to stop federation and only have Google-controlled chats go to the NSA.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm almost always fine with closed source software, but in this case, I would feel better if I could see how secure they are at the source code level.
Re: (Score:2)
It's like you've never heard of (a) inalienable rights, (b) computers that can scan as many signals as you need (irrespective of NSA staffing levels), or (c) unhinged prosecutors who take a personal disliking to someone and then dig up every piece of dirt they need to destroy them (as evidenced by the USA's beating every country in the history of the world on imprisonment numbers).
You don't need to be exciting. You can just be the wrong person in some local cop's or prosecutor's crosshairs, or the wrong add