A stipulation of Payne’s parole agreement was that he be willing to provide a passcode to his devices, though that agreement didn’t explicitly refer to biometric data. However, the panel said the evidence from his phone was lawfully acquired “because it required no cognitive exertion, placing it in the same category as a blood draw or a fingerprint taken at booking, and merely provided [police] with access to a source of potential information.”
These both seem like bad calls. You have a right to privacy, right? And for police to access your files/home/phone tap requires obtaining a warrant.
Fingerprints at booking gives access to public records. Not your own personal private data. Pretty sure drawing blood is justified suspicion of DUI.
Yes and no. When you take parole, you agree to give up some freedoms in exchange for getting out of prison early. For example, taking drug tests, checking in with your parole officer, or not leaving the state/country. If your crime was related to using a phone or something, like being a drug dealer, then it can make sense to have to allow your parole officer to check it.
So after you have been convicted of a crime, you will have restrictions based on that crime. That’s a world of difference from pulling over Bob and forcing him to unlock his phone.
On iOS at least, if you’re concerned about police breaking into your phone, you should be using a high entropy password, not a numeric PIN, and biometric auth is the best way to keep your convenience (and sanity) intact without compromising your security. This is because there is software that can break into a locked phone (even one that has biometrics disabled) by brute forcing the PIN, bypassing the 10 attempts limit if set, as well as not triggering iOS’s brute force protections, like forcing delays between attempts. If your password is sufficiently complex, then you’re more likely to be safe against such an attack.
I suspect the same is true on Android.
Such a search is supposed to require a warrant, but the tool itself doesn’t check for it, so you have to trust the individual LEOs in question to follow the law. And given that any 6 digit PIN can be brute forced in under 11 hours (40 ms per entry), this means that if you were arrested (even for a spurious charge) and held overnight, they could search your phone without you knowing.
With a password that has the same entropy as 10 random digits, assuming no further vulnerabilities allowing them to speed up the process, it could take up to 12 and a half years to brute force it. Make it alphanumeric (and still random) and it’s millions of years - infeasible within our lifetime - it’s basically a question of whether another vulnerability is already known or is discovered that enables bypassing the password entirely / much faster rates of entry.
If you’re in a situation where you expect to interact with law enforcement, then disable biometrics. Practice ahead of time to make sure you know how to do it on your phone.
Or they make a copy of your phone, alphanumeric password and all, and just sit on it for ten years until quantum computers make solving the password a piece of cake.
You should assume that any device confiscated by authorities will be copied and broken into eventually. Treat all data on said device as if it’s already compromised.
Copying an iPhone isn’t as straightforward as you seem to think. Copying data from a locked iPhone requires either an exploit or direct access to the SSD / memory chips on the device (basically, chip-off forensics, which likely requires bypassing the storage controllers), and I assume the same is true for Android devices.
I’m not saying such exploits don’t exist, but local police departments don’t have access to them. And they certainly don’t have the capability to directly access your device’s storage and then reassemble it without your knowledge.
Now, if your device is confiscated for long enough that it could be mailed off to a forensics lab for analysis? Sure, then it’s a possibility. But most likely if they want your data that badly they’ll either hold onto your device, compel you into sharing the info with them, or try to trick you into giving it to them. Hanging onto your data without a warrant for over a decade is a high risk, low reward activity.
Your data’s more vulnerable to this sort of attack in transit.
It calls them “passwords,” but personally I don’t consider a 6 digit number to be a password. And according to this article on GrayKey, 6 digit “passcodes” became the norm back in 2015. I haven’t seen any stats showing that people on average use more secure passcodes now, and making the passcode required more frequently isn’t going to encourage anyone to use one that’s more secure.
The article just says “disable biometrics” which is bad advice for the average person, as it will result in them using a 6 digit passcode. This is a knee-jerk reaction at best, and the resulting advice is devoid of nuance, made by someone who clearly doesn’t understand the threat discussed in the article, and would benefit literally nobody who might feasibly take it.
My advice is echoed by the article above, but it’s based off having an understanding of the problem area and suggesting a solution that doesn’t just address one thing. Anyone giving advice on the topic should consider:
known threats and reasonably likely unknown threats
the mitigations to those threats
how the technology works for both the threats and the mitigations
the legal landscape in your jurisdiction - for us, the US - both in practice and in theory
people’s attitudes toward security, namely their willingness to suffer inconveniences for its sake
how all of the above interact, and how likely someone is to take the advice given in a way that improves their security overall
The author of this article considered none of the above.
I still don’t get where are you seeing this advice in the article. No one is recommending “6 digit passcodes”. AFAIK all contemporary phones use mixed character passwords these days. I just setup a second hand s22 and it asked me to create a full password as primary authentication with all of the brute force strength hints etc.
As I said in my first comment, I’m more familiar with iOS, where 6 digit passcodes are the default.
That said, do you genuinely think the average person would use a random 10+ alphanumeric character passcode to unlock their phone after taking the advice of this article and disabling biometric auth?
Also, don’t use regular passwords with random letters and numbers, they are really hard to remember and easier to crack if the password isn’t complex enough. Instead, use a passphrase with at least 5 words.
Is that safe though? After seeing that XKCD I also thought it would be a good idea but then read that using passphrases is even worse because brute force attacks often use dictionaries as well to test word combinations, so one should use scrambled characters, just long enough to resist brute force.
The XKCD comic uses the entropy of common words assuming an informed cracker is using the best tools at their disposal, that being a dictionary attack. That’s why the entroy per character of the passphrase is so low compared to that of the special character password, but the passphrase can be much longer because it’s easier to remember, so that’s what gives it its higher total entropy.
Thanks for the clarification. So I can surmise that length is everything then? Given that I use a password manager I’ll just stick to my long gibberish passwords in that case, but it’s good to keep passphrases in mind for use cases where I can’t copy/paste easily.
Oh yeah, long gibberish passwords are strong. Keepass will tell me I have 137 bits of entropy on my password for instance, and that’s proper secure.
The Tr0ub4dor or whatever example in the comic assumes again an informed hacker using long random words and common substitutions, so you don’t have the full 56+ possibilities per character, it’s constrained to a very limited set. This is a pretty common password construction
For instance when I was in IT some government agency required our company to adhere to some security requirements before we could handle their data. Everyone went from 3-letter usernames + identical passwords to having a long word + numbers + characters. HOWEVER because nobody can remember these fucking things, every single password was a home address with the exception of a handful of month or person names which I assume were birthdays or kids. How do I know these secret passwords? Well, because they STILL couldn’t remember them, we had to…
I’m so sorry.
…keep everybody’s password in our own encrypted excell spreadsheet, so if anybody forgot, the IT team could read them all in plaintext to get people logged in. One person was so bad at remembering that I had their password memorised myself, and when I stopped pretending to look it up they stopped asking. Idk if they were shamed into remembering it or they just kept it in their wallet or something.
Also we needed secure server racks and encrypted drives etc. The server rack was a doozy - the handle was an intentional weak point to prevent forcing the lock, so I accidentally ripped it clean off with my bare hands one morning when the lock was slightly stuck. It took a while to get that fixed and I was exremely lucky I managed to jimmy it open using the nub of the destroyed handle. I couldn’t close it again so it sure wasn’t secure once that happened.
Security theatre, the lot of it. We spent six figures nationwide getting ready for that contract and the work they gave us was about four figures worth.
The entire corporate world is like this. If you wonder why your data keeps getting breached, this is why.
Yep. On Android there’s also a Lockdown mode that you can enter through the power menu when you need to turn off biometrics for the next unlock. Set a strong password. Use biometrics when you need to keep out a casual intruder, and password when you need to keep out a major intruder.
If you’re always concerned about sophisticated attackers, then you should also:
Disable biometrics unlock whenever your device is about to leave your possession or you’re going to sleep
Protect against shoulder-surfing / surveillance attacks that can capture you entering your password, e.g., by being aware of your surroundings and only entering your password or viewing sensitive information when you‘re certain your screen (and thumb locations) can’t be observed or by obscuring a view of your phone with your shirt or a blanket (like Snowden)
Take the time to learn more about security in general and in relation to the specific threats that concern you
FYI Androids have a feature for this. If you are ever forced to interact with a cop you can press the side button and volume up(might be different on other phones) to select lockdown which will force your phone to only be opened with the password. Its gross that we need this feature, but now you know.
It’s good that they have this, but there are a lot of situations involving cops where it’s not going to be safe to stick your hand in your pocket. I’ll just leave the biometrics off on my devices.
Yeah, but I want a combo that force starts the feature. I want to pull out my phone and be able to blind start it, not stare at my screen to select the correct thing.
I have Button Mapper trigger a Tasker task that locks my phone when I hold the volume down button, for some reason Button Mapper’s lock doesn’t trigger a lockdown.
Jesus christ this explains why occasionally I’ll pull my phone out of my pocket and it forces me to input the pin rather than the thumb print. It’s just one of those mildly annoying things that you wonder about but don’t think about enough to search for the answer.
Your situation is more likely to be caused by Android’s system to make sure you don’t forget your pin. It has a number of unlocks (and a length of time) before it forces you to do the code.
iPhones do this too. Hold the lock and volume down button until your phone buzzes, to get to the SOS/reboot screen. Once that screen is activated, it’ll disable biometrics until the passcode is entered.
You can even take photos/videos with the locked phone, and the recordings won’t be able to be deleted from your iCloud until the passcode is entered. Handy for recording cops. Cuz even if they take your phone and delete the recording, it’ll still sit in your “Recently Deleted” for 30 days. And while the phone is locked, they can’t access that Recently Deleted folder to permanently wipe it. So you can just access your iCloud account from any computer and recover the “deleted” footage.
I really think this depends largely on who you are and what you do with your phone. I have face recognition and fingerprint recognition both enabled on my phone. It’s good enough to prevent a thief from gaining access to my device, and if law enforcement asked, there’s nothing on my phone that could possibly be incriminating. Realistically, I’d have no issue just unlocking my phone and giving it to a police officer, although I do know well enough to always get a lawyer first. Biometrics add an extra layer of convenience; it’s nice to just look at my phone and it unlocks. My concern personally is more about someone stealing my phone and accessing my accounts than self-incrimination.
If I ever was going to put myself in a situation where I’d run afoul of the authorities, I’d leave my phone at home anyway.
So he was “only” coerced, ie likely verbally abused and lied to (which cops are allowed to do) about the consequences of refusing to unlock, instead of being physically forced. Such freedom.
“The general consensus has been that there is more Fifth Amendment protection for passwords than there is for biometrics,” Andrew Crocker, the Surveillance Litigation Director at the EFF, told Gizmodo in a phone interview. “The 5th Amendment is centered on whether you have to use the contents of your mind when you’re being asked to do something by the police and turning over your password telling them your password is pretty obviously revealing what’s in your mind.”
Lemmy quality descended quite quickly. What’s the more intelligent tech community alternative besides hacker news?
It seems everything descends into this samey mess of america bad, eat the rich which I don’t dispute with but I am here for tech and not politics honestly. Time and place for everything.
The amount of low effort comments that seem to only be about points/validation which aren’t even visible for some is tiring.
It used to be that you would look into comments for useful information about the posted article. Now you can skip the comments altogether and the posted links quality also became questionable.
I miss times where you could find links to some niche but full of creativity/usefulness websites in the comments or posts. Those juicy gems of the web. Or learn some fact that you had no idea about.
I want to learn something new being here. Not make my brain feel good with the reward of validation.
and this is why lemmy is a limp-wristed do-nothing. too many people here want to stick their head in the sand. but by all means, pls share some more star trek memes.
I mean I have curated my ‘All’ only to non world news and non memes comms and I was left with literally nothing except this community. There is literally nothing here :/
I will still keep using it whenever I can though just out of principle and to curb some of my Reddit addictions.
I am sorry to say nowadays 95% of content appears to be meaningless. Not contributing anything, not creative, not even funny lots of the times. I won’t sugar coat this
See I have this weird feeling that we are too different to even connect somehow. You didn’t even read my comment. Any benefit of doubt of mine is pointless when you just throw some out of place, bland one liner and don’t even want to discuss anything. It’s like talking to a wall
I don’t want to have a discussion. I want to unify a disgruntled public so we can make change for the better. Get friends if you just want to have a discussion. All I’m here to do is to get you to say it with me:
Too niche platform to waste your energy for that imo. Twitter or Reddit have way more range. That’s where all the political campaigns happen. And successfully so
I get tired of making a new reddit account every month because i spoke the truth in a thread. reddit censors too much to be of any use any more. i am supporting free speech by being here.
Take a deep breath and tell us how you really feel ;-)
I got here a bit late and it seemed like there was some decent discussion going on. Practical advice on how to lock various phones.
Some high quality pasta about how to survive the coming civil war ;-) Honestly good advice for anyone considering civil unrest there.
It’s small, but what’s really missing here? Someone dragging up the constitution? Being forced to incriminate yourself is wrong and any evidence gleaned should be inadmissible. Cops shouldn’t manipulate people into giving up their rights… but that’s the country we live in.
Reddit was a wash in low effort feel good upvote nonsense too. It just got buried faster.
To each his own but until I have time to post a bunch of high quality content, I’m not going to complain so bitterly.
I think they were victims of their own success weren’t they? Gawker was already kind of a tech-tabloid, happy to report rumors (which were often true or at least truth adjacent).
That kinda made them popular with both hardboiled techies who wanted to know when my shit was going to come rolling down, and regular folks who just wanted some good gossip… maybe wanted to touch our feet or whatever ;-)
With that success and the capital investment it garnered Gawker bought up all the good tech news sites.
Unable to produce meaningful content for that many sites on the limited budget their investors demanded Gawker invented the listical. And humanity wept —and kept clicking for some damn reason 🤨
Many years passed and the listical was clearly dying, so Gawker sought out a real zinger to boost their profile… I’m a bit hazy on the details, but it sounds like Peter Teal fucked them up the ass with Hulk Hogan‘s penis. 
However, the panel said the evidence from his phone was lawfully acquired “because it required no cognitive exertion, placing it in the same category as a blood draw or a fingerprint taken at booking…"
If the precedent is that unlocking the phone is the same category as fingerprint taking, well, what happens if you refuse to be “coerced” into having your prints taken? Even if the legal precedent isn’t fully understood, it looks like the reasoning here isn’t based on whether there was physical force applied, but whether the search required the contents of the person’s mind.
In many (if not most) US jurisdictions, operating a vehicle under a driver’s license specifically implies consent to a blood draw when under suspicion of impaired driving.
This is a dumb question. Almost 50 million people live in Sudan where there’s an ongoing famine. 70 million people live in UK where mass surveillance is roughly state supported. Asking why 300 million people don’t just move is … stupid
The difference is that people from the US and UK are generally welcommed in other countries. People from Sudan have a much harder time being let into other countries
As tourists, sure. But getting a work visa/residence permit is not as easy as you think.
And second of all, what do you expect? An entire country to up an leave? That’s stupid beyond measure. Won’t that entire country elect the same government wherever else they end up in?
1- Its correct that its not easy to get a residence permit, but it is a lot easier if you are entering from the US/UK than if you are coming from Sudan.
2- I don’t expect people leaving the US, to want to live like they did in the US. So assuming that they would want to create a similar life outside the US is kind of childish, and not even possible in most countries.
That said, it’s a figure of speech. You’re taking it too far and too literal
I live in the UK. A judge can compel you under Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to hand over any passwords for any devices or services they reasonably believe you have possession of the passwords for.
If you don’t then you can be imprisoned for up to 2 years for normal crime or 5 years for crimes relating to national security or the production, possession or dissemination of CSAM
While I buy you’re general cynicism, it’s wrongly applied here …
It seems like we have both more and less protections than other places, for this instance.
while it’s not entirely settled case law, you can NOT be compelled to give up your passwords. Different states differ and they’re constantly trying
however biometrics are counted as public knowledge, so you have no protections
This is more of a scenario where legal contortions turn into huge inconsistencies, plus our legislature has refused to clarify so it’s all on the court system
I’ve already planned to spam the lock button for a few seconds if something like that came up (iPhone) it triggers the emergency settings and disabled unlock without a passcode.
You can also just hold a volume button + power. That will bring up the power / emergency screen and will require a non biometric password for the next unlock.
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.
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. He looked ridiculous but perfectly “defaced”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn’t a modern smartphone have something like a 4000 mAH battery? And that lasts most people all day with room to spare? Even 100 mA every few minutes will get noticed, if someone has their phone off and expecting consumption to stay minimal.
And that’s the key thing here, you’re not just building a tracking platform but you are building it into commodity phone hardware without the users consent, and without them noticing. Any phone that burns that much power while off would likely get replaced by the user. Do you think the phone vendors are in on it?
It’s not 100mA every few minutes, it’s 100mA when calibrating from scratch with no satellites known.
I looked it up and the consumption when in normal use is around 30mA, which would mean that, say, if it took 10 seconds (probably a lot more than needed if you’re not travelling) every 5 minutes - which adds up to 120 seconds @ 30mA per hour - that would consume 1mA/h (PS: by pure absolute chance my numbers ended yielding a result of 1 ;)), which is 0.025% of that battery per hour. If you’re lucky, in the phone screen were one would be visualizing the graph for the battery power charge over time that would make the line fall 1 pixel.
It really is a whole other world out there in the embedded and low power systems domain.
In order to not “start from scratch”, though, you will need to save some state persistently about your location (and the location of the satellites), which will cost power. Then you go in a building and lose all your signal, while still burning power to maintain that old state.
If it was that easy and cheap in terms of power, AirTags would have GPS receivers. They don’t.
Flash memory preserves data without using any power at all. Ditto EEPROM. Both present in even the most basic of embedded processing cores (and the GPS protocol is implemented on those)
You need to move quite the distance for a GPS device to need to change just one satellite, much less all 3 and it doesn’t matter if you’ve been underground or not as the thing will just try first the ones in its memory and unless you travelled hundreds of km underground, it’s still going to be the same 3 satellites.
Last but not least, AirTags use CR2032 batteries with a capacity of around 200mA/h - 1/20th of a mobile phone one - and that charge is supposed to last for years between battery changes, not a mere few days until the next time the phone is charged. The power consumption of an AirTag must be thousands or even tens of thousands of times lower than what we’ve been talking about, in the order of nano-amperes not tens of milliamperes.
You’re clearly clinging on to that pre-conception of yours for reasons other than logic, and you keep on inventing wild theories based on zero domain knowledge, to try and justify that beloved pre-conception of your, so I’ll leave you to it since this feels like trying to explain that the Earth is roughly spherical to a Flat Earth believer.
You seem to be the one going through mental gymastics to justify why the button might not just turn the thing off. Sometimes they’re not out to get you, you know.
These phones cram oodles of stuff into a tiny space at super low margins , and are perfectly good at spying on their users when turned on. There’s no reason for them to spend any extra effort to spy when they’re turned off, for the .01% of people who turn their phones off regularly.
The margins aren’t as low as I thought, but they still aren’t giving any money away on their BOMs…
Let me explain this in a very very simple way: buttons which are not literally mechanical switches that physically connect and disconnect from power require that at least some of the circuitry to be alive because they’re capacitive contacts, a technique which requires some power and some logic to detect that the button has been pushed.
So even shitty shit $0.12 microcontrollers often come with support this stuff, so that they can generate a hardware interrupt in the microcontroller to wake it up when a user presses one such soft button to power on a device.
Beyond this, in order to support something as simple as wakeup from the network side - for example, to support Find My Phone functionality - even $3 microcontrollers (not microprocessors, microcontrollers, their cheap cousins with puny computing power) have features such as programmable secondary low power cores that consume tiny amounts of power.
Even this “advanced” stuff doesn’t add cents to BOMs, it only adds tiny amount of extra surface on vastly more complex microchips, which translates to at most tenths of a cent of extra cost because this stuff isn’t supposed to be decoding videos or running some social media user interface (or any user interface), it’s just running small simple programs which might use a few peripherals configured to remain active in low power mode (and those can be network related) to listen for certain conditions and decide if it should wake the main cores up or not.
The functionality isn’t there in the hardware because they added it to facilitate spying, it’s there because that’s just the direction the technology evolved in the last 2 decades - soft buttons instead of mechanical ones, some amount of always on functionality for fast start, support for convenience features for users, that require some kind of wake up from the network side or merelly because microprocessor or SoC makers add everything and the kitchen sink to their designs to try an make that chip usefull for the broadest list of use cased possible (it’s quite insane the amount of stuff built-in in even the cheaper of the the current generation of SoCs) so that those chips are used in more devices and get sold more.
But it gets better: none of this is necessary:
Hacked phones just simulate shutdown. They don’t even go into low power mode, they just show the user a fake shutdown animation and keep on running at full power.
Now, maybe somebody who has never been involved in Politics, or Demonstrations, or Strikes can go around with total confidence that their phone ins’t hacked, but if you’re anywhere close to the organisers of the kind of public demonstration that can snowball into to the current POTUS losing an election, don’t assume your phone hasn’t been hacked (which can be done remotelly) and that turning it off in the soft button marked power when you go into a meeting with other organisers has actually in fact fully turned it off in a way that makes sure it isn’t spying on that meeting.
let’s put aside everything @Aceticon 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.
Nothing in your links above indicate that the spyware operates while the phones are powered off (although I relied on a crappy translation of the French). Could spyware mock the shutdown process so that it looks like the phone is powered off while the phone is actually running? Sure it can, but the victim will be tipped off when the phone’s battery is being drained even while it is “shut off”. (And someone who is paranoid enough to shut down their phone would pay attention to that.) . It seems like it’s not worth the effort.
read, listen to people that were spied on using the pegasus software. Easy to find
i don’t know if you’ve met any real activists, militants in your life but they’re rarely geeks. And checking the battery of their phone or reading about battery life isn’t one of their priorities
Yes, info on Pegasus is easy to find. And never says Pegasus is active when the phone is powered off. It’s undetectable and insidious in what it can grab, but at no point is there any reference at all to being active while the phone is powered off.
If you have a reference that states otherwise (that isn’t written by an AI), please supply it. I’ll be happy to give up on this if someone can prove their point.
And that is because it is way too easy to detect when the phone is off, not only because of the battery drain, but because the radios would be transmitting when they shouldnt . Plus, persisting across a reboot requires some trace of the Trojan to be on physical storage, which is more likely to be found on a scan.
I am assuming that when a state-level actor is hacking a phone, they are targeting a person directly, and know how to get the Trojan on undetected. Their main goal will be to continue to siphon data off it while it is in use. It’s not worth the risk of detection to track it while it is off (and not being used, after all.) Don’t you think they would prefer to use the same method they used the first time to infect the burner phone that’s actually being used?
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.
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.
For 200-250$ you can get very decent used compact cameras (like the RX 100). It won’t upload the photos immediatly, but it is still pretty much on par with most current cell phones.
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.
On pixel, if you ever need to - press and hold the power button, select “lockdown”.
(It might apply to other androids too, I don’t know.)
You will now need a pin to unlock the phone. This disables the lock screen shortcut (camera, light, etc) as well.
Why disable your convence features for an scenerio that is not likely and can be quickly and easily be prevented.
Universal: You could also just the tap the sensor with a “wrong” finger a few time, and the pin will be required.
Maybe don’t do this one in front the cops…if you find your self in a postion where they are trying to unlock your phone, you probably don’t want to piss them off. .
Edit: I’m surprised no one called me out on “if you’re ever need to”. The sentence was going to be “if you’re even in a situation that needs…”, but that was getting too long. Forgot to change you’re to you.
It’s from AOSP, so any device close to the actual Android baseline should support that. This means that you can enter that mode from LineageOS as well.
First gen in-screen scanners were absolute trash. Borderline unusable. But the tech has improved quite a lot since the first ones. The one in my galaxy tab s9’s screen is fast and accurate.
The $1000 price tag on the Pixel tells me it’s a flagship device and yet the scanner is still trash.
But optical scanners just suck in general. I wish they’d bring back the rear sensor, it was so convenient both for unlocking and for having a shortcut to pulling down the notification shade.
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