The protester's guide to smartphone security

Post by ants_everywhere » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 2:54 AM UTC

rainonmoon wrote: post #180

ants_everywhere wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by HumanOstrich » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 2:59 AM UTC

nostradumbasp wrote: post #114

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…

Turn your phone off, and wrap it in 5 layers of tin foil. Or like you said leave the stupid thing at home.

Post by HumanOstrich » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 3:02 AM UTC

JohnMakin wrote: post #175

RiverCrochet wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by ants_everywhere » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 3:33 AM UTC

h0l0cube wrote: post #226

ants_everywhere wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While they were exaggerating by saying, "a lot of protests" This 7 year old article mentions 60 protests for a single election https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/how-russia-secretly-... Obviously the number has grown since then, and this only includes a subset of the protests known to be organized by Russian agents.

Huge shrug to that. Show me the evidence of the scale of it. 10%? 90%? There's an aspect of this reasoning that delegitimizes real protest movements, of which there are 'a lot', and of course there's a long history of 'a lot' of foreign geopolitical actors (including the US) of agitating actual grass-roots movements, muddying the waters even further.

Post by JohnMakin » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 8:55 AM UTC

HumanOstrich wrote: post #225

JohnMakin wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sounds like a great movie. When does it come out?