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The protester's guide to smartphone security

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Re: The protester's guide to smartphone security

#171

Post by G_o_D »

tehjoker wrote: post #13
diggan wrote: post #3

If you're attending a large-scale protest, it's likely that the cell-towers (or stingrays) won't be able to handle everyone who is connected anyways, so worth planning to use apps that can chat over P2P WiFi or Bluetooth together with the rest of your friends. This also allows you to continue using Airplane Mode the entire time, while being able to communicate with people nearby. Alternatively, investing in walkie-ta…

The battery thing can be important. One strategy law enforcement uses is to force your phone into a high energy state and zap the battery very quickly.

cold boot attack usually on pc and laptop, nowadays there are not much removable batteriez

Re: The protester's guide to smartphone security

#172

Post by scarface_74 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #169
scarface_74 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that they can’t tie the phone to a person. You also have to make sure you don’t get the burner phone some place with cameras.

Once the phone is on, they can tie it to a person with geolocation. Either directly if you do it at home, or indirectly when traveling in a vehicle associated with you.

The rule is that you don’t use your burner phone at home, you use it when you are at the protest.

Re: The protester's guide to smartphone security

#173

Post by philwelch »

georgeecollins wrote: post #112
philwelch wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s some strategic ambiguity going on here. If you’re going to a protest that looks like the Women’s March on Inauguration Day of 2017, you don’t have to worry about this kind of thing. If you’re starting fires or breaking into the Capitol building, you definitely do have to worry about this sort of thing. And just to make things even muddier, the exact same protest can radically change from one to the other base…

I think the "strategic ambiguity" here is ethics. Civil rights protestors were clearly breaking the law when they sat at diners that wouldn't serve black people. But who today thinks they were wrong? When I was a kid, students protested at Universities to divest from Apartheid era South Africa. People can agree on what the law is, but they don't always agree on what is right. Sometimes a democratic government will ze…

> Civil rights protestors were clearly breaking the law when they sat at diners that wouldn't serve black people.

Sure, and then they let the police arrest them because the sight of peaceful people being hauled off to jail for sitting at the wrong diner or on the wrong seat on the bus is the statement. It’s called civil disobedience; Thoreau both practiced it and wrote about it a century before the civil rights movement. What none of those people did was try to obscure the fact that they were breaking the law or evade the consequences. Their plan was to go to jail over and over again to make the injustice of the system constantly manifest. So how does this even remotely apply to the article, which is about trying to avoid legal consequences?

Re: The protester's guide to smartphone security

#174

Post by G_o_D »

There are some apps that detect fake base stations monitoring your traffic

There are apps that uses accelerometer and gyroscopic sensors to detect if phone is snatched execute certain action based on this

Use app lock, so in case your phone is opened, apps will still be locked --> lock galley + filesExplorer(any) + settings + playstore + Browser(All installed) + Cloud/RemoteDrives(any) + Any syncing apps + Contacts + Email+messaging apps etc

(Hell all apps for utmost paranoia)

Use apps that remotely sync your phone specific folder/gallery every time new file is created (So when taking photos or recordinf something, if pbone got snatched, data is deleted + phone is broken or formattef/wiped against your will, your files have already synced to remote location so no worries

Snoopsnitch https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.srlabs.snoopsnitch/

Stayput https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.y20k.stayput/

plucklockex https://f-droid.org/en/packages/xyz.iridiumion.plucklockex/

Re: The protester's guide to smartphone security

#175

Post by JohnMakin »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #141
theoreticalmal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this mean? What does the zapping accomplish?

Guessing from things I've heard, take this with a grain of salt: - In order for most cellular protocols to work successfully, it's necessary for the transmission power level (phone to tower and tower to phone) to be lowest possible. - So that tx power has to be constantly modulated because the phone's distance is always changing as it moves, meaning the optimum power level is always changing. - The tower is in contro…

I could hazard a guess that if someone made your phone really hot it would be able to be scanned by thermal imaging and pick you out of a crowd. Just leave phones at home, like, use 18th century methods if you have to. I dont pretend to care or know why people would be interested in this, but like, your phone probably is not your friend in a protest

Re: The protester's guide to smartphone security

#177

Post by crossroadsguy »

qwerty_clicks wrote: post #7
diggan wrote: post #3

If you're attending a large-scale protest, it's likely that the cell-towers (or stingrays) won't be able to handle everyone who is connected anyways, so worth planning to use apps that can chat over P2P WiFi or Bluetooth together with the rest of your friends. This also allows you to continue using Airplane Mode the entire time, while being able to communicate with people nearby. Alternatively, investing in walkie-ta…

What apps do you recommend with p2p messaging?

Depending upon which OS are on. If Android - Briar is the most famous and obvious choice. On iOS? There are not any options really but wasn't any usable one around a year back the last I had checked.

On iOS there are not many options for P2P w/o Internet (I assume that is what you meant - otherwise if you want P2P over Internet then there are some options although not really "truly" P2P of course - and of course if Internet is shut down or overwhelmed then it will be down). There's https://github.com/berty/berty (the last time I tried it was crashing incessantly but it might have improved). I do not know of anything else really (there might be few but I am not sure).

Re: The protester's guide to smartphone security

#178

Post by Xen9 »

diggan wrote: post #3

If you're attending a large-scale protest, it's likely that the cell-towers (or stingrays) won't be able to handle everyone who is connected anyways, so worth planning to use apps that can chat over P2P WiFi or Bluetooth together with the rest of your friends. This also allows you to continue using Airplane Mode the entire time, while being able to communicate with people nearby. Alternatively, investing in walkie-ta…

Absolutely best idea is to make an encrypted PDA & play forensic scientist by recording everything.

1. Get a Google Pixel 9, 9 Pro, or 9 Pro XL smartphone (Cellebrite-proofn at time of writing). 2. Verify images & GOS. 3. Disable biometrics & wireless connections. 4. Memorize with Anki or your own head a new, NIST-compliant passphrase with ≥ 8+ words. 3. Get a cover for the smartphone. 4. Buy EMI tape and electrically insulating waterproof tape. 5. Tape the insides of the cover with EMI, layering it & govering the inner walls as well, no gaps (overlay two adjacent layer always, say ≥ 1 cm, if possible) 6. Add one layer of the other tape to insides of the cover 7. Story inside your underpants 24/7 powered off when you don't use it.

My setup is more secure than not having phone, a Qubes laptop, a 2G burner, or not having phone.

Re: The protester's guide to smartphone security

#179

Post by Gud »

mathieuh wrote: post #157
echoangle wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking along the lines of „the state wants to oppress the protestors and makes it illegal“, but if you just want to avoid surveillance at a legal protest, yeah, you’re right.

“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” right? That’s the same logic politicians are using to make spying on populations legal.

No one was arguing this.

It’s possible to have encrypted communications without fucking up public parts of the spectrum.

Re: The protester's guide to smartphone security

#180

Post by rainonmoon »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #122
idlewords wrote: post #99

Unfortunately this is a topic that attracts LARPers. Remember that if things get spicy, you are not going to settings nerd your way out of a bad interaction with the police. Tech advice for legal and illegal protests is pretty much diametrically opposite, and advice for countries like the United States is much different than for somewhere like Egypt. It's complicated!

What a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of the protests are organized by people who do not care if you get hurt, arrested, or die. In the US, Russian operatives organize a lot of the protests that turn violent. They also organize the counter protests. In other countries, protests are often organized by foreign entities. The organizers will have good opsec, but everyone else is just (metaphorically) cannon fo…

These are some pretty obscene claims to make with absolutely no proof or citation.
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