How do you pay for jmp.chat? Do you trust their code to be bug-free and without possible exploits? Do they do regular security audits and code reviews? Do they have enough users and maintainers to be able to quickly detect and address security issues? Are you sure Airplane Mode turns off the baseband and cuts off all cellular communication? It doesn't, you can still emergency receive alerts in Airplane Mode. Your phone can tell exactly where you are by comparing your wifi search results + RSSIs to known public databases without even having to use GPS. How much do you trust your VPN provider to keep no logs? How do you pay for VPN?
I use the word 'mitigate' not 'solve' since closed source baseband modems are a problem. Cellular traffic is off in airplane mode, but the baseband could be exploited if someone wanted to find me AND knew which IMEI to target. Because the IMEI has never been associated to me, that is a challenge.
I run my own VPN and share it with a few other people.
How confident are you in your VPN server configuration skills? Gaining access through mis-configured self-hosted boxes is the easiest attack vector usually as most people who self-host aren't experts in the software they are using leading to leaks. Besides that, do you keep a list of packages installed on your box, open ports, etc? How about security patches and regular updates as well as auditing access logs to ensure no one gained access to your box?
Squeaky wheels get the grease and squeaky nails get the hammer, but silence in a noisy forest is alarming.
VPNs hide the content of connections, at least from MITM / eavesdroppers, but server-side data scrapes are quite effective at figuring out who you are (or what your phone is ... see below). Nothing really does a good job of hiding the fact that you are connected to a VPN except TOR, and where that connection originates (e.g., your wifi network, which is well Geo-located, remember?). And de-anonymization of VPN connections to identify downstream connections are possible, IIRC. Details about your phone are well recorded (MAC, SID, etc)
And always remember, your phone can be implicated based on location data, which will implicate you once it's discovered you own the phone. And that's as simple as looking up the SIM purchase / use.
When I am at home, I am WIFI only. When I am out, WIFI & bluetooth are off. This takes some discipline at first but then just becomes habit. I know the spot on my commute home where I switch my settings.
In theory it could protect location data from the carrier for locating you with a wild amount of opsec practice but I highly doubt you could pull that off for a daily driver.
Having wifi/bluetooth off in public isn't a terrible idea though as those are generally much easier attack surfaces and are leakier.
Suppose you wanted to find someone that aways turned on their phone on at ~8:15 AM and found someone that always turned their phone off at ~8:10 AM within 15 miles. How difficult would you say it was to make this connection?
All of these privacy focussed phone OSes tread lightly on the fact that there are a grand total of zero modern open source basebands in existence.
The carrier definitely knows where you live if you take your phone to your house at night, even if it is off. The only way to prevent that is to put it in a faraday pouch at your “airplane mode” checkpoint.
Why do you think basically zero phones have trivially removable/changeable batteries? Any phone that clams to be security first and doesn’t at least have a switch (an actual switch) that disconnects the battery altogether is a joke.
What does intelligence have to do with whether someone is a criminal? There are dumb criminals and smart criminals; I'm not sure what the correlation here is.
Treating this just like investments, over your lifetime, its a no brainer on which is the better path to take.
"Why do this risky exciting dangerous thing over there when you could come over here and be a flacid lifeless drone with me at Bezos' personal blowjob-drone company. Marry the first person you meet, have some kids, yay stability!"
Honestly though they might as well just use the average IQ for the population. There's not a person alive who hasn't violated some law at some point. We're all criminals.
You need burner phones to cycle after each usage.
TBH, seems you cranked up the paranoia to 11. The VPN has to terminate somewhere, so if I was a state actor attacking you, I'd figure out where that is. WiFi+BT firmware isn't bullet proof, either, and hypothetically an exploit chain could be found to enter via WiFi and stealthy enable cellular. In practice XKCD #538 applies: https://xkcd.com/538/
For most of us the attacker is someone trying to make some money by scamming, stealing CC or installing a malicious app.
It's the day you miss something that your effort was pointless. Even if your solution is always secure, it only takes one slip up to ruin everything
Any threat as large as youre trying to protect against, if interested in you, can just wait for you to make a mistake.
Anyhow, if one slip-up is enough, you're doing it wrong. Imagine you were a mad scientist testing out a jetpack- you are confident yes? But I imagine you would feel more confident with a bunch of nets, and a trampoline underneath that, and a lightning rod in case of a storm, and a requirement that you hold down multiple buttons at once to play with the controls, etc.
That is, if you are serious you will put in multiple safety nets at every layer of the stack so that "one slip" is not enough.
You like to talk to people, but you know that a long-term pseudonym is the gravest danger of them all.
You like virtualization, but you keep some crucial data and keys(treams) on a un-networked machine.
You like anonymizing networks, but you know the caveats of traffic tunneling and didn't connect from your home router.
You connect to a randomly-chosen wireless AP, but you know that just in case your MAC-spoofing fails or you get pwned or something, you are glad that you bought the device with cash and never tied its characteristics to your identity.
You are glad that the only transceiver connected to the device is an external wireless dongle so that when you are done, you don't accidentally connect with your device from home.
You are glad you waited for an overcast day so that you could thwart spy satellites that use visible/infrared light, and that you connected to the AP from afar to thwart cameras.
The list goes on. The guy whose face you see plastered in the news? Yeah, that guy thought his experimental jetpack was the shit. And it was- until it wasn't.
VPNs cannot break TLS, (unless you're dealing with the intelligence apparatus of a major power, which probably can break TLS) so they cannot introspect most of the content you send and receive anyways.
What they can do, however, is see the domain name of the HTTP requests you send when setting up TLS.
Chaining VPNs doesn't add security by any metric.
Do your family and friends do that?
Maybe it's better to blend in with the noise.
That's not how saved networks work, as far as I know. If you have a source saying otherwise, I would like to read it.
[0]: https://www.wi-fi.org/knowledge-center/faq/what-are-passive-... [1]: https://dot11ap.wordpress.com/active-scanning-probes/ [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36264440/phone-doesnt-se...
It's also possible GP is referencing GGPs arguably paranoid position on phones, relating it to similar paranoias held by Dwight (the character who delivers the monologue).
In one of those conversations, I was asked to not publish details about the extensive cellular tracking data that had helped to make the case. According to the detective, despite the ubiquitousness of cellular tracking data in prosecutions, your everyday criminal is not doing anything remotely like ‘throwing mobile phones out of the car window after each call.’ Quite the opposite, they are posting pictures of themselves with contraband to Instagram, and using their phones to facilitate crime as if they were untouchable.
Perhaps drug lords are more careful than lower-level dealers, but I’m not so sure. Total conjecture here, but I suspect the money gets to their heads, which leads to a feeling of invincibility — with consequent opsec failures.
If you keep an eye on major arrests, criminals routinely get taken down in essentially the same ways as the criminals who were caught before them. Despite their belief that they had been taking precautions against those failure modes.
At a certain level you stop buying burner phones and simply buy the whole phone company.
https://www.npr.org/2011/12/09/143442365/mexico-busts-drug-c...
Street level criminals are like Fast food employees - replaceable. The guys up the chain can be invisible indefinitely, but hooking up with the wrong girl, pissing off the wrong guy, being too impulsive or too deliberate with a decision etc can be the one mistake.
Also, public telephones are no longer an option.
This was also around the time remote meth labs were getting really common out in rural areas. Multiple agents were talking about how frustrated they were with getting access to burner phones since most of the companies were resellers. They said by the time they got a warrant to start recording the devices, they were already dead.
I guess the bad guys knew their burner phones were only good for about two to three months tops. That was usually the timeframe from when the FBI got a read on a line, saw a judge and got the warrant processed, to contacting the carrier and getting access.
Sounds like whatever was hampering them in the past has been fixed.
There are a tonne of reddit links on this one so I'll leave it to the Interested Reader.
1) Prudent opsec against nation-state adversaries dictates that you assume 0 time for them to have a tap on a device.
2) In reality, it takes >0 time, because people processes aren't instantaneous.
3) Intelligence services sometimes break the letter of the law.
4) Intelligence services usually follow the law, because it's less hassle.
That's not really a problem when intelligence services can just "remind" any would-be annoying congress person that they have endless amounts of data showing exactly what they and their family members have been doing and could plant whatever they want into the data they already have.
One of the things that finally convinced Snowden to give up everything he had in order to tell the American people that the NSA was violating their constitutional rights was when he watched NSA director James Clapper outright lie right to the faces of congress. After the truth came to light, do you think Mr. Clapper faced any meaningful consequences for that? Nope. Can you guess why not?
Intelligence services are too powerful to be held accountable by anyone. They'll do whatever they want.
I think I got hacked for trying to run for Congress.
"If video games have taught me anything, it's that if you encounter enemies then you're going the right way." - Ali G
lol
Specifically can your whatsapp/signal audio calls be recorded by FBI remotely in this manner?
Yes, court records show the FBI has and continues to explicitly do this. Leaks from folks like Snowden show the NSA/CIA have done this too.
> Specifically can your whatsapp/signal audio calls be recorded by FBI remotely in this manner?
The baseband firmware is at a level 'below' the operating system of the phone. It can directly access peripherals and intercept them, so it could be reading your microphone and passing it along to the higher level OS at the same time. WhatsApp/Signal thinks it's secure, and if you look at its app signature or anything else it looks exactly like the normal app you expect. However your data is still getting intercepted at the lower level and recorded for a state/government actor.
Baseband firmware is the firmware for the modem. It has no relation to the SoC that runs the phone, unless there is some sort of exploit that allows it direct hardware/memory access. To listen to the mic or capture video, it has to interface with the ADC chip which is not directly connected to it.
There may have been phones in the past that allowed DMA to the SoC from the baseband chip which hypothetically would have allowed a properly crafted exploit on a per app basis, but its not longer the case, as pretty evident by the FBI asking Apple to unlock the phones (if they could access the memory from baseband, they would not need to)
Are you saying that the electrical signals from the microphone and to the speakers pass through the baseband chip before/after going to the main chip on the phone? Or that the baseband chip has separate access to the microphone and speakers?
Hint, it's not the application you use but the microphone/speaker itself.
I wish my cellphone would not have all those sensors for this reason...
People are discussing that in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33958252
It looks like the implementation isn't perfect yet but it's a start.
10-20 years ago the FBI was regularly remotely programming firmware to listen in and record cell phone microphones to capture conversations of suspects. IIRC a mafia case hinged on data gathered in this way so it is not some abstract theoretical or crackpot theory (https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as...).
It's only gotten worse as phones have gotten more capable. You don't own squat about the device in your pocket at all times.