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Part of what to take away from this, do not go to organized events with your phone, leave it at home. They can easily and readily track you with it on or off.
Bring it but powered off in a faraday bag. If an emergency strikes you’ll be glad to have the option.
Just curious, what about a secondary (burner I guess) smartphone? I have an old phone I stopped using years ago that I flashed LineageOS onto, it has no SIM card, I keep it fully shut down until I leave my house, and it only has Signal on it for messaging purposes and ProtonVPN. Is that also a big enough threat? I used it while at a No Kings protest.
Are dummy phones the only way to go?
No phones, period. The phone will still send out signals, just that it won't be allowed service onto networks without the SIM card. They can still trace the phone to the point it turned on and since you used it previously as a personal phone there's probably records they can pull on it from your carrier at the time. They can probably trace it to you via the various numbers tied specifically to that phone. As much of a PITA it is, getting a small digital camera is the way to go as long as it doesn't do any connectivity. Just be sure to scrub the meta data on all pictures if you share them or post them online.
reminder the modem firmware we use on our phones is exploitable and most likely backdoored, and in some cases it has memory access to the rest of the device. israeli espionage companies can do it and sell their capabilities to law enforcement. (this somewhat applies to pcs with ME and PSP too, btw)
meaning they can target you regardless of what software you use. maybe not as easily or automated i guess, but always keep it in mind with their tech.
True, but they don't even need 0days or software exploits to breach the systems. The data is harvested legally and sold to whoever wants to pay for it. Insane amounts of data about everything you do is made commercially available by phone platforms, tech companies, apps, banks, email providers, retail establishments, cell phone carriers, governments, and of course their continual data breaches.
Anybody can target you too, it doesn't have to be espionage outfits or state sponsored threat actors. It's just for sale.
my key point is that they can rely on these exploits/backdoors if you are resistant in using the commercial data harvesting software, and they need to find you for some reason.
apparently a good percentage of pixel users are on graphene and fdroid, for example.
True, its just more work and not going to be used for dragnet surveillance.
Reminder that GrapheneOS.
graphene doesn't replace the modem firmware. i don't think modem firmware can be replaced on most phones.
Yes, the baseband is isolated on all of the officially supported devices.
And
The mobile Atheros Wi-Fi driver/firmware is primarily a SoftMAC implementation with the vast majority of the complexity in the driver rather than the firmware. The fully functional driver is massive and the firmware is quite small.
that's actually pretty nice. i didn't know pixels did that.
I blame Bush. He created ICE. But I also blame Trump for allocating 9 billions to ICE
Bush was Reagan 2.0, Trump is 3.0, all put in by the Heritage Foundation.
I also blame Bush but largely for his firm commitment to ignore the spirit of the bill of rights
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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Privacy
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