Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone
TheFriar@lemm.ee 6 months ago
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.
YoorWeb@lemmy.world 6 months ago
TheFriar@lemm.ee 6 months ago
And completely cover any tattoos. Even more identifiable than your face, honestly.
merde@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
you can always modify your tattoos, you can’t modify your face once it’s identified. I saw a man literally draw a face on his face before attending a protest.
I’ve also read about some blackBlocs getting identified, where i live, through their shoes. Police photographed people before and after the movement and their shoes are used as identifying information.
There is always the oldBloc who put their faces and names behind their words and proudly struggle through unions.
it’s already may 1st here. They will be out in about 10 hours. May the force be with them.
TechnoMystic@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Maybe get a dumb burner phone with no personal data on it. You could potentially keep your main phone in a secret/secure pocket.
Grippler@feddit.dk 6 months ago
keep your main phone in a secret/secure pocket.
Terrible idea, it will be found with absolute certainty if you’re arrested.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Just having a burner phone works against dragnet surveillance.
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.
simplejack@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
TheFriar@lemm.ee 6 months ago
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.
theconversation.com/police-surveillance-of-black-…
vox.com/…/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.
simplejack@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The problem is that the people doing the surveillance are hardly going around honestly telling people what’s their surveillance profile.
For example 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.
Also the lower the barrier to entry to surveillance the lower the “threat profile” needed end up in that dragnet: if the authorities already have well established and commonly used ways provided by ultra-broad surveillance court (or whatever those courts are 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, 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.
Grimy@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
TheFriar@lemm.ee 6 months ago
It’s your life. This advice is important in more active circles. There are also jobs that should be given out. Just like there are medics that come out, there should be journalists—in leftist action circles, this isn’t EMTs and NBC photographers. See what I’m saying?
It’s ultimately your choice. But depending on what’s happening, the cause, the state, the cops, the current state of the govt of the country, etc., this advice can literally be invaluable.
dhork@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
masterofn001@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
If you can’t take out the battery, it’s never actually off.
merde@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
let’s put aside everything !Aceticon@lemmy.world wrote you; if the French state was trying to legalize exactly this, it must be possible: la validation pure et simple de l’activation à distance des fonctions de géolocalisation de téléphone et autres objets connectés (voiture, balises airtag, montre etc) qui repose exactement sur le même procédé technique que le dispositif censuré : la compromission d’un périphérique, en y accédant directement ou par l’intermédiaire d’un logiciel espion pour en prendre le contrôle à distance.
source
PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The concern with bringing your phone is that police have subpoenaed cell providers to force them to turn over cell tower records. The police then used the lists of cell phones connected to those towers to track down protestors.
You shouldn’t bring your phone to a protest because it could end with police kicking your front door in three weeks after the protest has wrapped up.