Completely separate from the Section 1201 lawsuit against the Department of Justice, I’m working with the FPF on a project to counter lawful abuses of digital surveillance. Here’s the abstract:
Front-line journalists are high-value targets, and their enemies will spare no expense to silence them. Unfortunately, journalists can be betrayed by their own tools. Their smartphones are also the perfect tracking device. Because of the precedent set by the US’s “third-party doctrine,” which holds that metadata on such signals enjoys no meaningful legal protection, governments and powerful political institutions are gaining access to comprehensive records of phone emissions unwittingly broadcast by device owners. This leaves journalists, activists, and rights workers in a position of vulnerability. This work aims to give journalists the tools to know when their smart phones are tracking or disclosing their location when the devices are supposed to be in airplane mode. We propose to accomplish this via direct introspection of signals controlling the phone’s radio hardware. The introspection engine will be an open source, user-inspectable and field-verifiable module attached to an existing smart phone that makes no assumptions about the trustability of the phone’s operating system.
You can find out more about the project by reading the white paper at Pubpub.
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> You can find out more about the project by reading the white paper at Pubpub.
Well, I can’t, because I browse via Tor—to counter digital surveillance—and that site blocks Tor users. Is there a mirror?
Sorry about that, I’ve sent a note to the pubpub.org maintainers to see if something can’t be done about this problem.
Since we are willing to open up the phone for modification, why not simply introduce a (physical) switch between the battery and the phone. You loose the ability to use the phone when you turned it off, but it is a simpler solution that will work across most, if not all, phones.
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How do I donate to support this project?
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Why a case? why not a whole phone, open from the ground up? I’m sure you have your reasons, I just wonder what they are.
This is a waste of time. If you already have the technology and capability to build something that can operate within the envelope of mobile phone or GPS signaling, why not build an ACTUALL phone that you KNOW will not transmit when it is not supposed to? I’m dead serious. Crap like this diverts labor away from actually usable pursuits and just makes sure the current lifestyle continues unabated.
But I guess that’s what you want.
This is significantly simpler than building up a full phone. In fact if you’d read their publication they don’t intend to do anything with RF anyway. All you need for this is an FPGA, a basic microcontroller or CPU (you could even put that on the FPGA), and some software/gateware. Building up a fully open source phone with an open source baseband would be many orders of magnitude more difficult as it requires some serious cutting edge RF engineering to be worth doing.
Hi Bunnie!
I am doing research and was wondering if you could inform me of exactly what Snowden is contributing to this project? Was it the general idea? What it specifics of how the phone is collected on? Was it any actual coding or hardware specifically? I’m trying to get an idea of how much of this technology is from you and more specifically how much is from Snowden exactly.
It’s a great device for alerting people when their phones are transmitting metadata. This open source system will protect the location of important journalists and other hacktivists who are working on sensitive issues.
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I read this post completely about the comparison of latest and preceding technologies, it’s remarkable
article.
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I too have had a lot of trouble with accessing the paper via pubpub, but I don’t even use tor – it may be a more general VPN clash btwn website & IP/server data.