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this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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I appreciate what he is trying to do, but hiding from a state actor in 2023 is VERY hard to do. A lot harder than a clean phone. It is SO much more than that.
I highly recommend the late Keven Mitnick's book The Art of Invisibility to anyone that could be at risk of this. If anything about the cautionary stories about the TINY mistakes that landed people in hot water.
Basically, the only way to be anonymous with a phone in am authoritarian regime is to walk to a place that sells them without being seen by cameras, pay someone cash to go buy a burner and prepaid service card for you with cash, and never use it in physical proximity to any device tied to your identity in any way and never anywhere where someone can ID you or on camera. Only use it for calls and text. For Internet stuff, only use public WiFi connecting through ToR, but even that requires some diligence. That is just scratching the surface.
TLDR: Assume an authoritarian regime is omniscient within their borders. Play by the rules unless you know what you are doing. Don't piss them off. Don't mildly annoy them.
If you have never worked in infosec, worked in IT operations in a TS environment, worked in intelligence, worked in security/operations of some super secure environment like a CA, or worked as a detective AND have hirable tech skills, can understand everything at DEFCON/Black Hat at a basic level, or have practically memorized everything in the aforementioned book and updated since it's release in 2017, you don't know how to hide and you WILL end up on the rack.
Yeah. A clean phone is plausible for somebody briefly visiting an authoritarian country for a few days though.
Here is the thing. Being wrong leads to torture, imprisonment, or death.
That is the minimum as a tourist or business that doesn't intersect with their interests.
As an activist or journalist, when they review the visa application, that puts a target on them. They are a direct threat to the control that these governments will do anything to maintain. In the aforementioned book, Mitnick cited a case where he was in Columbia. Someone entered his hotel room while we was at dinner and swapped out the drive in his laptop with their own.
Another case showing the power of the state to find someone they don't like. A drug kingpin in Australia was caught because even though he had several burner phones, he sometimes used more than one burner phone within too short of a time frame at the same physical location. Their police were able to use the cellular data to find him, even though he went through none of the phones were tied to his identity. This is just a criminal nuisance, not someone that threatens their economy, reputation, and control.
For sure. The odds of torture, imprisonment, or death for first-world activists during COP28 is pretty low - they're a lot more likely to follow their history of using wiretaps.