Donald Trump has vowed to deport millions and jail his enemies. To carry out that agenda, his administration will exploit America’s digital surveillance machine. Here are some steps you can take to evade it.
If you arent an actual journalist who is being personally, specifically hunted then you probably don’t need to take the same precautions as one.
And yea, the guide boils down to “none of these things are 100% safe but they are realistic things you can do that can offer more protection than not doing them.”
Your skimming of the article missed how they do indeed talk about the shortcomings of every suggestion they have. For example, the article also does indeed talk about how you can turn off gps but your phone will still ping towers revealing your location, and goes on to say that you can put your phone in a faraday bag but that isnt practical for most people but is indeed an option if you want to do it.
The fundamental issue is still giving people a false sense of security. It is why it is INCREDIBLY important to be very very specific about what you do and don’t get from various actions. Otherwise you have the same problem as all those people in countries where being LGBTQ was criminalized who realized elon musk owned their DMs.
Also: Putting your phone in a farraday bag half a mile from a protest doesn’t take much effort to detect.
Just to expand on the phone thing because it amuses me:
In a past life myself and a few others had access to cell tower records for a specific company. As a research project, we applied what we would now call AI/ML concepts to sanitized data (basically all customer IDs were mapped to a different ID set and then the mapping was thrown away).
For poops and giggles I checked the tower nearest the local happy ending massage place. And, lo and behold, we were able to immediately get a list of everyone who turned their phone off for 30-60 minutes.
Lol you think the feds won’t notice that a person of interest’s phone went dark for the first time in 5 years?
Everyone gets this wrong. If you want to hide, hide inside your established patterns of life. You want to do shit across state line for a weekend? Don’t turn off your phone, have your friend carry it around while you are gone.
If you arent an actual journalist who is being personally, specifically hunted then you probably don’t need to take the same precautions as one.
And yea, the guide boils down to “none of these things are 100% safe but they are realistic things you can do that can offer more protection than not doing them.”
Your skimming of the article missed how they do indeed talk about the shortcomings of every suggestion they have. For example, the article also does indeed talk about how you can turn off gps but your phone will still ping towers revealing your location, and goes on to say that you can put your phone in a faraday bag but that isnt practical for most people but is indeed an option if you want to do it.
The fundamental issue is still giving people a false sense of security. It is why it is INCREDIBLY important to be very very specific about what you do and don’t get from various actions. Otherwise you have the same problem as all those people in countries where being LGBTQ was criminalized who realized elon musk owned their DMs.
Also: Putting your phone in a farraday bag half a mile from a protest doesn’t take much effort to detect.
Just to expand on the phone thing because it amuses me:
In a past life myself and a few others had access to cell tower records for a specific company. As a research project, we applied what we would now call AI/ML concepts to sanitized data (basically all customer IDs were mapped to a different ID set and then the mapping was thrown away).
For poops and giggles I checked the tower nearest the local happy ending massage place. And, lo and behold, we were able to immediately get a list of everyone who turned their phone off for 30-60 minutes.
Lol you think the feds won’t notice that a person of interest’s phone went dark for the first time in 5 years?
Everyone gets this wrong. If you want to hide, hide inside your established patterns of life. You want to do shit across state line for a weekend? Don’t turn off your phone, have your friend carry it around while you are gone.