If you can, leave your phone at home
That’s it! There’s the answer!
If you aren’t communicating that a protest happened, then it didn’t happen.
It’s quite literally the entire point.
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Of course! It’s so obvious!
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LAAAND OF THE FREEEEEEEE
Start protecting your privacy by not visiting the Verge and the 876 partners they share your personal data with.
What happens if you click manage settings?
You get to choose even more companies to share with.
Not much better.
They let you reduce it to 540 partners they somehow deem “essential” most of which are ad networks.
how to secure your phone: leave it at home. Done
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Restart it before you leave but don’t log in when the restart completes. That’ll make it harder to break into.
Not buy one?
Buy a burner, keep the battery out until you arrive at the protest, remove the battery when you leave the protest. Don’t store any phone numbers in that phone.
Not that protesting will do anything anymore, that time has come and gone
This is the answer.
There’s just no fucking way you should go to a protest with your daily driver, secure or not.
I also wouldn’t go without any form of communication. You need to be able to receive information from organisers. Maybe go with a buddy who has a burner and not take anything yourself, but expect to get separated if you’re in a larger group.
I personally wouldn’t be too spooked beyond that, but of course it depends on the level of “activism” you’re going to be involved in. As in I wouldn’t dick around taking the battery out, and I’d save relevant contacts in the phone.
They’re not going to go all CSI miami on your device and your contacts. If they ask you to unlock your phone they will just be looking for selfies of you doing something incriminating.
Epoxy the usb port or otherwise eliminate any usb communication so they can’t get in that way. And only use wireless charging
Get in to what exactly?
The police have a device that they can plug into your phone and see everything on the phone, cellbrite is the company name.
Plug in to my burner?
Sure - time they spend there is time not spent on something more incriminating!
No offense but obeying in advance is fucking pathetic and it is what your last comment is doing.
Any civil disobedience does matter and changes alot more than you think. They also want you to think it doesnt matter, it does.
It is also dangerous to tell others protesting wont do anything, you are spreading fascist fears and you dont even know it.
I disagree about saving numbers, you should add your emergency contacts and anyone you went with in case you get separated or shit goes down
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I still remember some of my school friends’ phone numbers form 30+ years ago, but I have difficulties remembering new people I meet. My brain is weird.
I have 1 number committed to memory, and it’s the only one I need if I get arrested. Until that happens I prefer to stay in touch with my people
There are forms of protest beyond just going on a parade through town
The EFF also has an article: https://ssd.eff.org/module/attending-protest
Back when I had Amazon smile, the donations went to the EFF. This makes me happy it went to a worthy cause.
Smile only existed to bleed referral revenues away from search engines. Once enough people started using their app directly they no longer needed smile to make them skip referrers.
Which search engines would do that?
I was going to complain in the comments that the article doesn’t mention anything about lockdown mode on iOS, but thankfully this eff one does. Thanks for sharing a superior article!
Do not bring your phone with you to a protest.
If you really need a phone on you, get a burner phone with a prepaid card not linked to your person. But remember, MITM attacks are possible and the police can intercept your traffic and in some cases even compromise your E2EE services (if the key exchange takes place on a compromised spoofed network, see stingrays [1]).
If communication is necessary, get a meshtastic device. It’s not the most reliable, and the channels can be jammed, but no one will bother with that. Because they work on usual IoT/smart home appliances frequencies, there is so much interference in cities that triangulating your position in a crowd of people isn’t very realistic.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/07/31/protests-surveillance-stingrays-dirtboxes-phone-tracking/
I’ve been using my old(cleaned installed) pixel 1 & 3 with my R1 meshtastics during this recent protests. Very helpful.
I’ll have to look into this. I have an old Pixel 4a I use occasionally, and it’d be nice to make it more useful
Clean install that bad boi (those 4a were done really well), update everything possible and then turn off as much settings/features as possible. It’s like reviving a 7 year old PC with Ubuntu 24.04.1(coming from an emotional standpoint than logical),the thing is badass again. It’s a great offline device. Meshtastic, music player, eReader, remote, (use local non-two-way VPN) GPS, etc etc. to keep that device living longer for another 7-10 years, buy a replacement battery sooner than later.
Yeah the battery is pretty well shot, but it’s otherwise in perfect condition.
Please accept this cookie before learning how to not be tracked :/
What a boring dystopian article. It’s sad, but necessary.
purchase and use a burner phone instead, and only turn it on when you’re at the site of the demonstration
This should be the de facto response. In addition, I’d suggest not using your personal phone for any protest related communications and stick with burners no matter how much you may trust the organizers.
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For a good compromise, use Meshtastic. Long-range radio mesh network for texting that phones can use instead of cell networks.
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Yes! If you leave the default channel enabled it will join the public meshtastic network. But you can run eight channels at once, and the others can have different encryption keys.
The default setting is also to forward any received packets to the mesh, even ones it can’t decrypt.
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No worries! If you’re starting out you can’t go wrong with a T1000-E. It’s water resistant, has GPS built-in, and ties everything together in a neat package for ~$35. There are plenty of other nodes out there but it’s more of a build your own kit situation. If you’re into microcontroller programming and stuff like arduino/RP/etc then Heltec v3 Lora boards are good tinker hardware.
We also have a community here on mander for meshtastic.
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One good thing about a phone over a camera is automatic backup. If you have a burner smartphone uploading all of your images to Dropbox (or whatever) as you take them, and then you think your phone is about to get taken, you can wipe it or even destroy it without losing the photos. Not so a camera.
Also, a cheap burner phone is way cheaper than pretty much any standalone camera on the market. It’s hard to find a point and shoot digital camera (or any type of film camera) these days that isn’t super pricey, because they’ve become hobbyist items.
How To Secure Your Phone
- Leave it at home
Why is this even an article? Do not bring your phone to protests, especially under a republican president, especially one like Trump.
Step 1: Dont take your phone
The Hated One is another good resource on these topics. The guy is a paranoid and has an extreme threat model, but the information is still on point. Worth watching and sharing.
Write down your name and ICE information with a sharpie on your body. Use a rugged phone case.
Don’t bother going to peaceful protests, they don’t work against post-truth authoritarian governments.
I’ve been involved in peaceful protests and in other actions. Get out there and attend peaceful protests. It helps develop your situational awareness, you learn what it’s like being at a protest, and often you’ll get to find out what happens when the police and/or counter-protestors run amok. And even when the corporate media suppresses reports of protests, there are other ways of getting that information out.
As for non-pacifistic direct action, operational security and comms security are even more critical. This thread is probably not the place to discuss it in detail. Just be aware that the few normal constraints on the behavior of the authorities have been relaxed or lifted entirely.
I participated in the biggest protests since the fall of Russian occupation in my country. I helped people organise and prepare, I joined a political party and ran in local elections. Results? None, because there was no path to those and leadership up top is mostly concerned about their position. It was actual virtue signalling even though I hate everyone who uses this term.
What is your plan exactly? There is raising awareness but are you actually convincing anyone? Is someone unaware of what’s happening? What I’m seeing is that libs assume everything Trump supporters say is wrong and vice versa, there’s no discussion so how can any of you convince each other? It was similar here and we’re still stuck with this setup. In a polarised world people picked their sides based on criteria that were important to them and then pulled into a boxing match between liberals and fascists. You could have even agreed on some things but you hate each others guts to the point where you assume all positions of your political football team. If you engage in those ineffective ways of political activism you’re just going to have people run out of steam for nothing.
I want to see articles about attending revolts!
