Volunteers Around the World Build Surveillance-Free Cellular Network Called 'Sopranica' (vice.com) 77
dmoberhaus writes: Motherboard's Daniel Oberhaus spoke to Denver Gingerich, the programmer behind Sopranica, a DIY, community-oriented cell phone network. "Sopranica is a project intended to replace all aspects of the existing cell phone network with their freedom-respecting equivalents," says Gingerich. "Taking out all the basement firmware on the cellphone, the towers that track your location, the payment methods that track who you are and who owns the number, and replacing it so we can have the same functionality without having to give up all the privacy that we have to give up right now. At a high level, it's about running community networks instead of having companies control the cell towers that we connect to." Motherboard interviews Gingerich and shows you how to use the network to avoid cell surveillance. According to Motherboard, all you need to do to join Sopranica is "create a free and anonymous Jabber ID, which is like an email address." Jabber is slang for a secure instant messaging protocol called XMPP that let's you communicate over voice and text from an anonymous phone number. "Next, you need to install a Jabber app on your phone," reports Motherboard. "You'll also need to install a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) app, which allows your phone to make calls and send texts over the internet instead of the regular cellular network." Lastly, you need to get your phone number, which you can do by navigating to Sopranica's JMP website. (JMP is the code, which was published by Gingerich in January, and "first part of Sopranica.") "These phone numbers are generated by Sopranica's Voice Over IP (VOIP) provider which provides talk and text services over the internet. Click whichever number you want to be your new number on the Sopranica network and enter your Jabber ID. A confirmation code should be sent to your phone and will appear in your Jabber app." As for how JMP protects against surveillance, Gingerich says, "If you're communicating with someone using your JMP number, your cell carrier doesn't actually know what your JMP number is because that's going over data and it's encrypted. So they don't know that that communication is happening."
Welcome to 2004 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah but, now we have an app!
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The lack of a cellular network in their cellular network should be no cause for concern, because it just means they're implementing the latest Clientless infrastructure advancements. This is the future!
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The network needs to know "where you are", agreed. That is to say, there needs to be some way for it to route packets to your IP address.
However, there's no reason in principle that the same entity that controls the network also needs to know *who* corresponds to each IP address, or *whom* you're communicating with.
It may not yet be a solved problem, but it's far from an impossible one.
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However, there's no reason in principle that the same entity that controls the network also needs to know *who* corresponds to each IP address
Other than knowing who to send the monthly bill to, or who to charge the pay-as-you-go to, no reason at all.
If you've already managed to get around them knowing who you are (by cash pay-as-you-go?), then what does this new system gain you? Your location, if not your name, will be known no matter what, when you get your internet over your phone.
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"SIP over XMPP? Already had it. It doesn't work well."
Perhaps it didn't work well in 2004 when there were no smartphones.
"And towers still need to know where you are in order to reach your phone."
Where I live, the whole town has free wifi, the young kids don't even own a SIM card, the don't care about towers.
Re: Welcome to 2004 (Score:2)
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Be advised: Google Voice is a thing, and does work.
Just because they shut off 3rd party access doesn't mean it didn't work.
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Where I live, the whole town has free wifi
What town is this?
Re: Welcome to 2004 (Score:2)
But they don't know who you are.
Only read the summary but.... (Score:4, Interesting)
As of right now, I've walked MANY through getting google voice going on mobiles and ditching the monthly bill. Works good until they catch on and force you re-verify the number you setup, at which point it seems your no longer able to make calls (originating from that number) but you can still receive voice mail. The privacy trade-off is obvious when working with any google product, but for quick and dirty free wifi phone it worked great (last time i set it up for somebody)
It sounds like this is pretty damn close to the same thing, only without all the snoopy big tech middle man garbage. I'm going to try it.
These phone numbers are generated by Sopranica's Voice Over IP (VOIP) provider which provides talk and text services over the internet.
Regarding the encryption, where does it take place? Is this privacy-centric un-named VOIP provider/DIY network subject to NSLs?
I suppose I should RTFA....
Re: Only read the summary but.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Only read the summary but.... (Score:3)
I find VoIP.ms to be better than google voice in most cases anyway. GV seems to be using a pretty inefficient codec, so while the call quality may be just fine over WiFi or a good LTE connection, it starts to die pretty quickly as your signal degrades. Over 3G it's pretty choppy even with a good signal.
Meanwhile VoIP.ms let's you pick from several different codecs. I find g729 work quite well even on a shitty 3G connection.
They also let you do wonderful things like set up IVRs to block out spam calls. I
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What's old is new again? (Score:2)
How's this different than using SIP over one of the http://www.talkonaut.com/ [talkonaut.com] clients?
It's at least 11 years old.. Can't reinvent the wheel.
Plenty of encrypted UDP, IP (Score:2)
> they are really encrypting it, then they are tunneling UDP (SIP) over TCP (for TLS)
Just finished Chapter 1 of Basic Cryptography?
"Encryption" doesn't mean TLS, and TLS doesn't require TCP. Plenty of common applications use encrypted UDP, some do TLS over UDP. IPsec, which is built-in to the Linux kernel, encrypts IP. Some apps, such as Cisco Anyconnect, can set up EITHER an IPSec connection, OR a TLS-based connection.
I wrote an IPSec / ISAKMP / IKE client a couple of months ago, so that's one I'm rat
Wow (Score:1)
Another voice over internet protocol app! Wooooow
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A while back I suggested using a passive alert system.
Your phone could listen for its ID and receive text messages without revealing it's location. Making calls or sending messages would however reveal your location to your carrier.
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Your phone could listen for its ID and receive text messages without revealing it's location.
When it registers with the cell site, so the cell site knows where to send the ID and text message, the system will determine your location. All your phone has to do is register, and it does that just to know it has service and what to listen to.
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You misunderstand it's just broadcasted to all cells assuming your phone might be on and listening.
As a result its going to have limitations like a limit to rebroadcasts and a time interval between them.
Still it wouldn't scale well but would probably scale plenty well enough for the number of people that I think would actually be interested in this.
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You misunderstand it's just broadcasted to all cells assuming your phone might be on and listening.
Actually I believe you are partially misunderstanding, and parent is correct.
From grandparent:
Your phone could listen for its ID and receive text messages without revealing it's location. Making calls or sending messages would however reveal your location to your carrier.
The existing cellular network does not work via broadcasting messages to all towers such that your phone could passively listen for it.
Your phone registers with the cell tower, which updates the carriers internal routing info, and only the
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Correct this would be used along side the existing cellular networks. However as was pointed out to me what I was thinking of already exists as one way pagers but not as a combined device. You could recive texts directly via a one way pager along with notice of attempted incoming calls then if you needed further information and weren't somewhere you you needs your location protected you could switch the cellular side of your phone on and continue like today.
It wouldn't fully eliminate tracking but it would
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I suspect the volume of broadcasts would be prohibitive.
In practice, the best you could do is expire logs quickly and be sure to actually delete them.
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Oh your right I did. Neat!
Which also means that even without the ability to scale it still has enough capacity to be viable.
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The network would still be centrally managed so every tower would recive and broadcast the message every 10 minutes 4x or so and then give up never knowing if the message was actually received.
It won't scale which is why it wasn't done in the first place.
But it would still likely handle everyone that would be interested in a allways on communications network that only tracked you when you were transmitting. Eg when you called someone, sent a message or browsed the web.
Would make it so your location isn't re
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We need to replace the commercial infrastructure... We need people to set up hotspots that are limited to this application only somehow, and for those to prevent abuse. For example voice data should be small so we can limit bandwidth, and limit amount of users per hotspot. Just needs people to volunteer their support.
The bigger problem with the entire concept being that even if it works as advertised, the government will enact laws, rules, regulations to criminalize it. The US government will never tolerate any system of mass domestic voice/data communications that they cannot monitor/track/decrypt/control. Even Cardinal Richelieu needed those 6 lines from the most honest of men and the ability to read them in order to have him hanged.
It would help citizens to effectively oppose what the government does that they are un
Portmanteau (Score:4, Interesting)
Sopranica is a portmanteau of the words "Sopranos" (i.e. The Sopranos, criminal activity and shady dealings hidden from public view and the authorities) and "Silica" (i.e. the chemical compound used to make silicon wafers for manufacturing microchips).
Crime through Technology.
Sopran-ica.
Survilance free network (Score:2)
If people want to get surveillance free networks they have to get a handheld radio (or base station at home) and get a transmitter for it (with range up to ~100 km). The problem today is that no easy way to network together many transmitters over the internet and it requires a licensed frequencies (public channels are off limit for this type of usage). It is possible but last I knew the set-up is both difficult and not necessary a stable one (might require a lot of DIY hardware). Radio to radio communicatio
JMP founder/programmer here - taking questions (Score:3, Interesting)
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For cryptocurrencies, we currently only support Bitcoin (you can arrange Bitcoin payment by messaging me privately). We are considering adding others.
No, we do not respond to NSLs. Since all of JMP's own infrastructure is located in Canada, we have no obligation to do so. However, JMP's carrier is largely based in the US (necessarily if you have a US number) so they might respond to NSLs.
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Soprani.ca is a collection of projects that aims to replace the entire cell phone network (its radio portions, its telephone network portions, etc.) with freedom-respecting alternatives - the title tries to encompass all of this, but perhaps that wasn't clear. To hopefully clarify a bit, here are the two main Soprani.ca projects right now:
JMP [jmp.chat] - A gateway to the phone network (including complete SMS support and MMS picture messaging) that you can use entirely over the Internet without involving any sort of
Initially I thought it was the Serval project... (Score:3)
... but as some already said, it's just an app more... :-D
If really you want to see what an actual, independent mesh network can be, please go to http://www.servalproject.org/ [servalproject.org]
And yes there is an app
But this one, works -including from tablets with no SIMcard inside.
IMHO the only issue is, this will become useable only when thousands will run it, including some in your neigborhood...
Sopranica vs Jitsi (Score:2)