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Comment by Arnt | Hacker News Reader

Try harder.

Pretend there's a phone on my desk now that was bought by someone else via ebay and reflashed to cyanogenmod. There actually was, its owner forgot it while visiting, but you can pretend that you're a powerful snooping government and that's my secret phone that you want to hack. Not registered in my name, not purchased by me, maybe there's not even a SIM card in the phone. How do you go about "just hacking into" that phone or using the "available backdoors"?

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The phone still contacts the network for E911 service. Locate the phone on your desk based on signal strength to towers. If the phone moved every day it would be easy to uniquely identify, but even if there's some false positives who cares? Then simply access the application processor through the baseband processor which is likely the same chip and pwnt-by-design given its secretive nature and the stakes.

The only reasons we trust Intel processors is because A. we have to, and B. we (think) we can audit all of its communications. Neither of these is true for a cell phone.

Good point, very good point, but you too are skipping the first hurdle: Learning the name of the phone's user, or even narrowing the number of candidates down from millions to thousands.

Well, usually there has to be a SIM card in your phone to use it for communication. That SIM card has an ID and sooner or later there is going to be a correlateable pattern - the location of a phone which happens to be close to you very often or simply a voice that can be identified as yours. It depends if NSA wants you and then figures out your alter egos or if its the alter ego they care first about and then they'll try to figure out who's the real ego.

What's the satisfaction to be 100% untraceable anyway? The practially and politically relevant idea is to not cater your data to them.

>Well, usually there has to be a SIM card in your phone to use it for communication.

Isn't the whole point here to only use public WiFi through Tor with the "anonymophone"?

WLAN is sufficient for a lot of use in some use cases, but that's a digression. The main point is that even if you do have zero-day exploits, just finding the phone can be a big, big hurdle, particularly if you don't know the name of its main user.

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