They are perfect for protests. If you are not coordinating or worried about realtime Twitter, but instead documenting, you don't even need a cheapo prepaid SIM.
Wipe them first, and don't leave them anything other than pictures of their own abusive behavior for them to find, unless you'd also like to gift them a copy of the Constitution or perhaps some personal musings on the role of policing in modern culture.
If phones worked like this, people would keep them for many more years, but there would still be more than enough 10+ year old phones available for a close approximation to the shipping cost.
It would also mean that the older phones would go to poor countries that could still use them instead of being slag, because "slow but runs current software" is usable whereas "not even old enough to be slow but can't run current software" means you can't use the thing because websites will throw certificate errors from missing roots, apps won't run on it and it will be full of known vulnerabilities and get malware.
> Based on 110 public records requests to state and local law enforcement agencies across the country, our research documents more than 2,000 agencies that have purchased these tools, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We found that state and local law enforcement agencies have performed hundreds of thousands of cellphone extractions since 2015, often without a warrant.
[1] https://www.magnetforensics.com/products/magnet-axiom/cloud/
Given the mass protects and how much phone live streaming was involved NEXT years report will be truly revealing.
It's possible it wont jump all that much as when arrested many protestors had their phones at least temporarily siezed, and the Grayshift[2] boxes law enforcement have probably don't need Apple's involvement.
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grayshift