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Comment by kaosjester | Hacker News Reader

In the near future, criminals will learn to leaves their cellphones at home while committing crimes, using burner phones for any contact they need during that time.

Which, incidentally, is advice that the Shadowrun tabletop RPG gives freely as advice to would-be players...

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> leaves their cellphones at home while committing crimes, using burner phones for any contact they need during that time

That's getting a lot harder to do in practice. OPSEC is hard when you have to care about stuff like overlapping usage of the burner so the movement logs of the regular phone stopping don't correlate with when the burner starts moving.

Zoz gave a great overview[1] of modern cellphone OPSEC at DEFCON 22.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8#t=2292

Criminals have long ago started doing this. The ones that want to stay out of jail, that is. Not that that will help them much because even then they still leave quite a bit of digital detritus to use as a means of tracing them.

The only way to commit a crime and not be caught immediately will be guy in a non-contamination suit on a bicycle.

One of the seasons of the popular TV drama The Wire [1] revolved around drug dealers using burner phones for communication, making it really difficult for the police to wiretap them. So the idea has been out there for quite some time now.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire

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