LEAVE YOUR PHONES AT HOME. Write down some numbers in case you get arrested—or better yet, memorize them. There are journalists there for documenting. And there will be plenty of other people that don’t follow this advice. Leave anything they could use as leverage over you and your cohorts away. Don’t bring ID. Don’t bring anything except what you need for the action. It’s not worth the risk.
ETA: also, any of you with a new car? DONT DRIVE THAT SHIT TO ANY MEETING OR PROTEST. They’re spying on you. Don’t post about it. Don’t use any unencrypted messaging service to coordinate it—WhatsApp is not safe. Signal and probably some other less common ones are the only ones safe enough. Ride a bike there, stash it in a conveniently hidden spot. Bring a change of clothes, plan escape routes, plant the change of clothes either hidden on your escape route or wear them under your plain clothes. Cover tattoos. Leftist activists are not safe. And literally the rest of your life could depend upon how well protected you have made yourself.
So many states have pretty quietly passed laws to make you a felon for protesting. Even peacefully. And to make you a fuckin corpse. In the south especially, a few states were writing “go ahead, run over any protester in the road” laws.
Be smart. Be safe. Have a plan. Have a contingency plan. This isn’t “fuck around with the blunt end of the justice system and find out” territory, in 2024 US, it’s time to be as safe as you can while doing what’s right. Because doing what’s right is criminalized. Heavily.
If you’re going somewhere where you think you might be at risk, IMHO, it’s probably just easier to turn your phone off. Android and iOS both require a non-biometric passcode after boot.
Or, if you want to keep your phone on, enable lockdown mode on Android, or tap power 5 times on iOS to require a non-biometric password at the next unlock.
It’s never a good idea to bring your phone with you. It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you. The BLM protests were just the tip of the iceberg. The apps you have on your phone track you. The government is buying that tracking data. Your phone is a massive privacy weak point. It’s basically a bug you carry on you willingly. It’s not safe. Period.
Leave your phone at home. It’s not worth it. It may not bite you in the ass the day of, but could very easily come back to haunt you after they investigate, in case anything goes “wrong” in their eyes. It’s just not worth it.
IMHO, as someone that works in security / privacy, I tend not to view it as a binary thing. It depends on where you live, what you’re protesting, what you look like, who you are, etc.
Are you in Russia or China and are protesting the government? Yeah, I might leave that thing at home. Are you a white lady in San Francisco marching with a pink knit cat hat during brunch hours, then you’re probably well on the other side of the risk spectrum. You might actually be introducing more risk by having less immediate access to communication or a camera.
The problem is that the people doing the surveillance are hardly going around honestly telling people what’s their surveillance profile.
For example in the UK that “pink knit cat hat white lady” would very likely be under surveillance if she was a member of the Green Party and participated in demonstrations. In fact, recently a number of cases came out where in the 80s and 90s the police had infiltrated Ecologist groups and even left some of the women in those groups pregnant with the children of men they late found out were undercover agents.
Further, the lower the barrier to entry to surveillance the lower the “threat profile” needed to end up under surveillance: if the authorities have already have well established and commonly used processes backed by ultra-broad surveillance court (or whatever those courts are called in your country) orders to just get from the mobile network providers all the phone numbers that connect to specific cell towers during a specific time period (such as the ones nearer a demonstration during that demonstratiom), pink knit cat lady is going to end up in the list just as easilly as baclava-wearing hard-core anarchist looking to break stuff.
They might not hack the pink knit cat hat lady’s mobile to install eavesdropping software, but she’s still in the list for every demonstration she attended carrying her phone and for the authorities finding out those who were at multiple demonstration and cross-searching with other databases to resolve those numbers to actual identities is pretty easy unless those people jumped through hops to keep those things disconnected (which, funny enough, smart anarchists are more likely to have done than your average pink knit cat hat lady)
We take on risk every time we decide to wake up and start the day.
I live in a place where I’m considerably more likely to get hit by a car while walking than thrown in jail as a political prisoner. That doesn’t mean I’m never going to go for a walk. I’m going to live life.
Leaving my phone at home seems pretty silly when the risk is very low in my nation and I do riskier things while cooking dinner.
Oh, in day to day usage I agree with you: we’re all one little uninteresting datapoint in a whole lot of datapoints and there are plenty of other ways in which we are tracked.
However if you’re part of a Political Party or Movement and/or attend demonstrations, it’s probably wiser to leave the phone at home, if only because that makes you stand out as a much more interesting datapoint than average.
It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you.
How? The only legit thing I can think of is if they are tracking you anyway, and then they see your phone is turned off, they might try to claim that you must be up to something. But they won’t be able to track it while it’s off.
That’s not quite how it works, though. These devices are basically mini computers now, there’s a limit to what they can do without fully booting. Devices that are plugged into the wall might be likely to retain some power-draining function while plugged in, but there’s only so much you can do on a trickle charge while a phone is powered off.
They’re still running in low power mode and can wakeup from the network so they can absolutelly be made to “boot up” without turning the screen on and you being aware of it.
This is not like a bloody PC were the lights turn on and you can hear the fans when the thing starts, it’s a machine with a low power mode in which it can already do a lot and which can be brought to a high power mode if needed without there being any visible or audible side-effects to alert the user.
Unless you completelly cut it off from power (by taking the battery out, which you can’t in most modern smartphones) that smartphone with the lights off, the screen off and making no sound at all can just as easilly be in low power mode waiting for you to press the On button, as it can be in full power mode with a mobile network connection active, accessing the microphone and the GPS microchip and sending that data out, and both will look exactly the same from the outside.
I think you are overestimating what these devices can do when turned off, specifically when whoever is doing the tracking wants to be covert. Devices like Cellular Radios and GPS chipsets are getting more efficient every year, but they still consume enough power that it would be noticed if they came on by themselves even if the device was off.
I have an EE degree and have actually done work with embedded systems, including GPS.
The peak consumption of things like GPS is maybe 100 milliamps, with the average being in the tens of milliamps.
The wireless networking stuff is similarly frugal.
Further, stuff like encoding of audio is all done on the hardware and very efficient so even voice capture and encoding to send over the network isn’t processor intensive.
Further, the CPUs on those things are ARM designs or equivalent, specifically crafted for low consumption and which have tons of tricks to avoid spending even a mW extra of power if it’s not needed (basically the CPU will tend to activate only the bits it needs and use only the resources it needs to accomplish the operations its running, so it’s almost never running at peak consumption).
The really big power consumption in modern smartphones is the screen and from very high GPU/CPU usage in things like games.
I think you seriously overestimate the similarity between modern portable devices design to operate from quite small batteries and things like desktop Personal Computers which are designed to operate from mains power.
If all they’re doing is sending your GPS position out over the netweork every couple of minutes you won’t notice that the battery has drained a tiny bit faster than expected even if you keep a keen eye on consumption because so little power is used to run just that part of the functionality.
I think the fact that we are able to record everything that happens and automatically upload it seriously outweighs what you are saying.
The only reason cops get in trouble is only because people are filming. If it’s not caught on camera, it didn’t happen in the eyes of the law if it’s just our word against a cops.
No. Several Jan 6 participants tried burners and they still got caught because the burners were still linked to their movements and activities and their personal phones were unusually unused/off/immobile for the amount of time the burners were used. You would have to expend a lot of effort to make sure your burner was completely disconnected from yours and your phone’s location, as well as making sure your phone showed signs of appropriate activity in your absence.
Just having a burner phone works against dragnet surveillance if one is not doing really stupid shit like logging in to one’s personal social media accounts from one.
If however it’s an actual crime which actually gets investigated by actual criminal investigators, they’re going to be coming at it individually and using much more specific techniques than just “use a surveillance warrant to get a list of all mobile phones that connected to certain cell towers at certain points in time and plonk them all on a database to cross-check with similar data from other demonstrations”.
You can’t just treat a burner phone as a second phone that you have active anywhere near your home, place of work or places you normally frequent and you can’t just keep it and keep on using it for a long period of time: the longer one holds on to that burner phone the more data points there will be that can be bulk checked with other, identifyable, data from other sources (say, car tracking data) to find out a more than normal overlap.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if those people with the burner phones had them with them active whilst ridding their personal vehicles which had something like OnStar or were dumb enough to log-in to their Facebook account from them.
Further advice regarding civil disobedience:
LEAVE YOUR PHONES AT HOME. Write down some numbers in case you get arrested—or better yet, memorize them. There are journalists there for documenting. And there will be plenty of other people that don’t follow this advice. Leave anything they could use as leverage over you and your cohorts away. Don’t bring ID. Don’t bring anything except what you need for the action. It’s not worth the risk.
ETA: also, any of you with a new car? DONT DRIVE THAT SHIT TO ANY MEETING OR PROTEST. They’re spying on you. Don’t post about it. Don’t use any unencrypted messaging service to coordinate it—WhatsApp is not safe. Signal and probably some other less common ones are the only ones safe enough. Ride a bike there, stash it in a conveniently hidden spot. Bring a change of clothes, plan escape routes, plant the change of clothes either hidden on your escape route or wear them under your plain clothes. Cover tattoos. Leftist activists are not safe. And literally the rest of your life could depend upon how well protected you have made yourself.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/10/felony-charges-pipeline-protesters-line-3
So many states have pretty quietly passed laws to make you a felon for protesting. Even peacefully. And to make you a fuckin corpse. In the south especially, a few states were writing “go ahead, run over any protester in the road” laws.
Be smart. Be safe. Have a plan. Have a contingency plan. This isn’t “fuck around with the blunt end of the justice system and find out” territory, in 2024 US, it’s time to be as safe as you can while doing what’s right. Because doing what’s right is criminalized. Heavily.
If you’re going somewhere where you think you might be at risk, IMHO, it’s probably just easier to turn your phone off. Android and iOS both require a non-biometric passcode after boot.
Or, if you want to keep your phone on, enable lockdown mode on Android, or tap power 5 times on iOS to require a non-biometric password at the next unlock.
It’s never a good idea to bring your phone with you. It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you. The BLM protests were just the tip of the iceberg. The apps you have on your phone track you. The government is buying that tracking data. Your phone is a massive privacy weak point. It’s basically a bug you carry on you willingly. It’s not safe. Period.
https://theconversation.com/police-surveillance-of-black-lives-matter-shows-the-danger-technology-poses-to-democracy-142194
https://www.vox.com/recode/22565926/police-law-enforcement-data-warrant
Leave your phone at home. It’s not worth it. It may not bite you in the ass the day of, but could very easily come back to haunt you after they investigate, in case anything goes “wrong” in their eyes. It’s just not worth it.
IMHO, as someone that works in security / privacy, I tend not to view it as a binary thing. It depends on where you live, what you’re protesting, what you look like, who you are, etc.
Are you in Russia or China and are protesting the government? Yeah, I might leave that thing at home. Are you a white lady in San Francisco marching with a pink knit cat hat during brunch hours, then you’re probably well on the other side of the risk spectrum. You might actually be introducing more risk by having less immediate access to communication or a camera.
IMHO, it’s nuanced.
The problem is that the people doing the surveillance are hardly going around honestly telling people what’s their surveillance profile.
For example in the UK that “pink knit cat hat white lady” would very likely be under surveillance if she was a member of the Green Party and participated in demonstrations. In fact, recently a number of cases came out where in the 80s and 90s the police had infiltrated Ecologist groups and even left some of the women in those groups pregnant with the children of men they late found out were undercover agents.
Further, the lower the barrier to entry to surveillance the lower the “threat profile” needed to end up under surveillance: if the authorities have already have well established and commonly used processes backed by ultra-broad surveillance court (or whatever those courts are called in your country) orders to just get from the mobile network providers all the phone numbers that connect to specific cell towers during a specific time period (such as the ones nearer a demonstration during that demonstratiom), pink knit cat lady is going to end up in the list just as easilly as baclava-wearing hard-core anarchist looking to break stuff.
They might not hack the pink knit cat hat lady’s mobile to install eavesdropping software, but she’s still in the list for every demonstration she attended carrying her phone and for the authorities finding out those who were at multiple demonstration and cross-searching with other databases to resolve those numbers to actual identities is pretty easy unless those people jumped through hops to keep those things disconnected (which, funny enough, smart anarchists are more likely to have done than your average pink knit cat hat lady)
We take on risk every time we decide to wake up and start the day.
I live in a place where I’m considerably more likely to get hit by a car while walking than thrown in jail as a political prisoner. That doesn’t mean I’m never going to go for a walk. I’m going to live life.
Leaving my phone at home seems pretty silly when the risk is very low in my nation and I do riskier things while cooking dinner.
Oh, in day to day usage I agree with you: we’re all one little uninteresting datapoint in a whole lot of datapoints and there are plenty of other ways in which we are tracked.
However if you’re part of a Political Party or Movement and/or attend demonstrations, it’s probably wiser to leave the phone at home, if only because that makes you stand out as a much more interesting datapoint than average.
I agree with your point, but balaclava is the hat, baclava is the delicious Greek pastry.
How? The only legit thing I can think of is if they are tracking you anyway, and then they see your phone is turned off, they might try to claim that you must be up to something. But they won’t be able to track it while it’s off.
If you can’t take out the battery, it’s never actually off.
That’s not quite how it works, though. These devices are basically mini computers now, there’s a limit to what they can do without fully booting. Devices that are plugged into the wall might be likely to retain some power-draining function while plugged in, but there’s only so much you can do on a trickle charge while a phone is powered off.
They’re still running in low power mode and can wakeup from the network so they can absolutelly be made to “boot up” without turning the screen on and you being aware of it.
This is not like a bloody PC were the lights turn on and you can hear the fans when the thing starts, it’s a machine with a low power mode in which it can already do a lot and which can be brought to a high power mode if needed without there being any visible or audible side-effects to alert the user.
Unless you completelly cut it off from power (by taking the battery out, which you can’t in most modern smartphones) that smartphone with the lights off, the screen off and making no sound at all can just as easilly be in low power mode waiting for you to press the On button, as it can be in full power mode with a mobile network connection active, accessing the microphone and the GPS microchip and sending that data out, and both will look exactly the same from the outside.
I think you are overestimating what these devices can do when turned off, specifically when whoever is doing the tracking wants to be covert. Devices like Cellular Radios and GPS chipsets are getting more efficient every year, but they still consume enough power that it would be noticed if they came on by themselves even if the device was off.
I have an EE degree and have actually done work with embedded systems, including GPS.
The peak consumption of things like GPS is maybe 100 milliamps, with the average being in the tens of milliamps.
The wireless networking stuff is similarly frugal.
Further, stuff like encoding of audio is all done on the hardware and very efficient so even voice capture and encoding to send over the network isn’t processor intensive.
Further, the CPUs on those things are ARM designs or equivalent, specifically crafted for low consumption and which have tons of tricks to avoid spending even a mW extra of power if it’s not needed (basically the CPU will tend to activate only the bits it needs and use only the resources it needs to accomplish the operations its running, so it’s almost never running at peak consumption).
The really big power consumption in modern smartphones is the screen and from very high GPU/CPU usage in things like games.
I think you seriously overestimate the similarity between modern portable devices design to operate from quite small batteries and things like desktop Personal Computers which are designed to operate from mains power.
If all they’re doing is sending your GPS position out over the netweork every couple of minutes you won’t notice that the battery has drained a tiny bit faster than expected even if you keep a keen eye on consumption because so little power is used to run just that part of the functionality.
I think the fact that we are able to record everything that happens and automatically upload it seriously outweighs what you are saying.
The only reason cops get in trouble is only because people are filming. If it’s not caught on camera, it didn’t happen in the eyes of the law if it’s just our word against a cops.
Maybe get a dumb burner phone with no personal data on it. You could potentially keep your main phone in a secret/secure pocket.
Terrible idea, it will be found with absolute certainty if you’re arrested.
No. Several Jan 6 participants tried burners and they still got caught because the burners were still linked to their movements and activities and their personal phones were unusually unused/off/immobile for the amount of time the burners were used. You would have to expend a lot of effort to make sure your burner was completely disconnected from yours and your phone’s location, as well as making sure your phone showed signs of appropriate activity in your absence.
Not so easy.
Just having a burner phone works against dragnet surveillance if one is not doing really stupid shit like logging in to one’s personal social media accounts from one.
If however it’s an actual crime which actually gets investigated by actual criminal investigators, they’re going to be coming at it individually and using much more specific techniques than just “use a surveillance warrant to get a list of all mobile phones that connected to certain cell towers at certain points in time and plonk them all on a database to cross-check with similar data from other demonstrations”.
You can’t just treat a burner phone as a second phone that you have active anywhere near your home, place of work or places you normally frequent and you can’t just keep it and keep on using it for a long period of time: the longer one holds on to that burner phone the more data points there will be that can be bulk checked with other, identifyable, data from other sources (say, car tracking data) to find out a more than normal overlap.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if those people with the burner phones had them with them active whilst ridding their personal vehicles which had something like OnStar or were dumb enough to log-in to their Facebook account from them.