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Burner Phone 101

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Re: Burner Phone 101

#91

Post by bigiain »

theothertimcook wrote: post #6

In many countries you need a valid government ID document to activate a mobile service which means burners do not really exist in those places. Unless you bought a pixel, graphene’d it and then paid a homeless person to activate a pre-paid data only sim which you would top up with vouchers paid in cash and used a von and international voip service… A lot of effort though

> In many countries you need a valid government ID document to activate a mobile service which means burners do not really exist in those places.

Buying prepaid SIMs from tourists or foreign students returning home is a reasonable easy workaround for that - at least if you're the sort of person who meets and befriends those sort of people.

Re: Burner Phone 101

#92

Post by ivanjermakov »

firesteelrain wrote: post #75
mikeytown2 wrote: post #34

If you need to communicate with people in your area and not be tracked; MeshCore software with LoRa hardware like the this https://lilygo.cc/en-ca/products/t-lora-pager is something to consider. Text only, completely offline

Or just ham radio (not anonymous though)

And illegal to obscure/encrypt: http://www.arrl.org/part-97-text

Re: Burner Phone 101

#93

Post by bigiain »

XorNot wrote: post #69
eptcyka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should never turn on your burner in a place where you use your regular phone, duh.

And yet realistically you also probably don't turn it on except when you're within about 50 miles of your home. And this is while you're flagging yourself heavily by (1) using a phone which is easily identified as a burner and (2) using it intermittently which means you're trying not to be tracked. So you've already substantially identified yourself in any dataset.

I'm not sure how many people would get any use out of a burner phone that they need to be 50 miles away from home top use?

One of my hobbies is Recreational Paranoia. I used to have (probably still do in a drawer here somewhere) a 3G WiFi hotspot, with an Arduino and GPS module that powered down the battery within a few km of home (actually, within a few km of a public library that's a few km from home, so plotting all the power up & down locations would centre on the library not my house). I could then leave home with that in my backpack and instead of my phone take a wifi only device - I mostly used an iPod Touch but also sometimes Android tablets. I wouldn't get actual phone calls sir SMS that way, but those are both rare for me, most of my social comms are via Signal which worked just fine.

I figure wifi cellular hotspots are "not easily identified as a burner phone" and that intermittent use of them is the most common case. It would still have been able to be tracked as being a thing that turned on and off in my surrounding suburbs, and I'm sure I slipped up last least a few times and had it with me while I also had my phone with me - but like I said this was for my hobby, not running an international drug cartel or doing journalism critical of Saudi Royal houses...

Re: Burner Phone 101

#94

Post by refurb »

bigiain wrote: post #91
theothertimcook wrote: post #6

In many countries you need a valid government ID document to activate a mobile service which means burners do not really exist in those places. Unless you bought a pixel, graphene’d it and then paid a homeless person to activate a pre-paid data only sim which you would top up with vouchers paid in cash and used a von and international voip service… A lot of effort though

> In many countries you need a valid government ID document to activate a mobile service which means burners do not really exist in those places. Buying prepaid SIMs from tourists or foreign students returning home is a reasonable easy workaround for that - at least if you're the sort of person who meets and befriends those sort of people.

At least where I live tourist SIMs are restricted to 2 weeks, then need to be converted to a local SIM (with ID requirements).

And anyone leaving would have their immigration status expire and the SIM is turned off then unless you provide some other proof of residence.

Re: Burner Phone 101

#95

Post by BLKNSLVR »

schoen wrote: post #39

When I was working at EFF, I started writing (but never finished) a couple of essays along the lines of "the degree of trackability of mobile phones is an unfortunate accident, and we should fix it". It basically comes from routing requirements (especially to receive incoming phone calls) combined with billing requirements (to make people pay for their connectivity) combined with the empirical requirement to see whic…

I have no technical knowledge about these, and being cryptocurrency related there will be lots of exasperated huffs, but there are a couple of alternative mobile network related projects: World Mobile and Helium.

World Mobile claims 99% coverage of the US, although I think it uses existing networks where there's no native coverage.

They're "interesting", but only early days, and I don't know how close they come to what you describe for privacy and opposition to data aggregation. Large-geographic-area comms coverage isn't something that there's ever going to be a lot of options for.

Re: Burner Phone 101

#98

Post by qingcharles »

Ccecil wrote: post #24

One thing I didn't see covered is to never have your "real phone" and your "burner phone" on you (or in the same location) at the same time while powered. Easy enough to say "Gee...these 2 phones are always together or nearby when activated" or "this phone shuts off right before this one powers up". Although, I suspect there are a few other ways to determine identity easier. Such as tracking the device identifier and…

So many online services use the proximity of phones to determine things like related persons and related accounts. Facebook is notorious for this. In one building I lived at Facebook would constantly show me the names of everyone coming in and out as "You might know this person" even though I had no idea who they were.

Re: Burner Phone 101

#99

Post by schoen »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #95
schoen wrote: post #39

When I was working at EFF, I started writing (but never finished) a couple of essays along the lines of "the degree of trackability of mobile phones is an unfortunate accident, and we should fix it". It basically comes from routing requirements (especially to receive incoming phone calls) combined with billing requirements (to make people pay for their connectivity) combined with the empirical requirement to see whic…

I have no technical knowledge about these, and being cryptocurrency related there will be lots of exasperated huffs, but there are a couple of alternative mobile network related projects: World Mobile and Helium. World Mobile claims 99% coverage of the US, although I think it uses existing networks where there's no native coverage. They're "interesting", but only early days, and I don't know how close they come to wh…

I was imagining mobile operators that cooperated to some extent with the changes I was proposing, or at least didn't obstruct them. If it's using existing GSM protocols, the IMEI would have to be rotated frequently (and it's not that obvious how to do that without making the connection between the old IMEI and the new IMEI apparent), and the SIM technology would have to change. (What it's trying to prove in a privacy-friendly communications system is more like subscriber entitlement, not subscriber identity!)

There's also the "netheads and Bellheads" theory from the 1990s which can be taken to say that phone companies would never make technical changes to make themselves collect less data, or to be less helpful to government surveillance. Sometimes I think this is right. I still remember how I took part in a meeting with a mobile phone industry association or industry consortium of some sort about a year before the Snowden stuff. Someone on my side said "so, let's talk a bit about surveillance issues", and someone on the other side replied "sorry, that's something we don't talk about". Imagine an industry meeting with privacy advocates where the industry people are completely precommitted to not talking about surveillance!

Re: Burner Phone 101

#100

Post by commandersaki »

Always remember the three Cs of OPSEC (credit to grugq): compartmentalisation, cover, and concealment.

Most OPSEC failures are due to leakages which is a failure of compartmentalisation.

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