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Comment by zepolud | Hacker News Reader

It would be very irresponsible to recommend buying a burner phone to people trying to stay anonymous. At the very least, it would give away your location even if you somehow manage to remain unrecorded by street CCTVs in the vicinity of the shop at the time of purchase. Assuming it is even possible to buy one without providing full personal details, as is required by law in most of the EU.

Twitter now not only gives platform to powerful demagogues, it is also actively stifling dissent by effectively disallowing anonymity.

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FWIW, in the UK you can buy a burner phone and SIM in cash without giving away any personal details at most supermarkets (at least Tesco and Sainsbury's). With the new EU regulations removing roaming charges, you can fly to London on holiday, and buy a UK burner phone anonymously with two years of data on it that's enough for heavy Twitter use in all of the EU for £240 + phone cost.

If you're under enough surveillance that your adversary will follow you on holiday and track all your supermarket purchases, you have bigger problems.

> If you're under enough surveillance that your adversary will follow you on holiday and track all your supermarket purchases, you have bigger problems.

Problem with modern surveillance is not that somebody is actively tracking you, it's the ability to retroactively track you back with perfect accuracy soon as you become become an inconvenience.

Sure, for digital surveillance I get this concern. But when we're talking about identifying that "on holiday, subject X spent some of that cash he withdrew on a burner phone at a random supermarket he visited, not just on ice cream and beer", then you really need significant HUMINT resources.

> for digital surveillance I get this concern

In the context of maintaining digital anonymity against a state-level adversary, I think that considering retroactive unmasking as part of the threat landscape is quite reasonable.

The situation one is trying to avoid is:

- Tyrant in power - You try to be anonymous - You fail, because you didn't take enough steps to protect your tracks (when buying the phone, leasing the VPS, accessing the VPS, etc) from retroactive investigation - You are now fired / jailed

Surveillance is ubiquitous enough that I suspect anonymity is nearly binary in nature.

That was addressed in article

>Security cameras will probably record your face at the store. Most stores delete old footage on a regular basis, overwriting it with new footage. If possible, wait a week or two before you start tweeting so that the footage is already deleted by the time anyone tries to figure out your real identity.

This addresses shop cameras, not street-level government surveillance that would be accessible for 10+ years and is trivially addressable by the time and location of the transaction.

Would a disguise at time of purchase not help reduce this risk?

Probably, but doing it correctly would require a whole different type of opsec expertise that should not realistically be expected from someone who is getting their security tips from The Intercept.

Fair enough. Opsec is not at all my domain of familiarity so I've no idea what challenges it might present to do it properly.

Just a hunch, but I would guess that a poor disguise would be more suspicious than no disguise. If I was a shopkeeper and government agents came to me asking if I remembered anyone suspicious in the past month, I'd probably recall the guy with the obviously fake mustache and prosthetics.

On the other hand, an effective disguise can be trivial: enter a store dressed a certain way, make purchase, exit dressed significantly different. Reversible jacket, headgear swap and glasses can go a long way, in a crowd under low-res cameras.

They would probably ask you to remove the disguise. You could pay a hobo to buy you the phone, though.

This is the solution, right? You get someone else to buy the phone for you. This necessarily will practically speaking be probably be someone who knows you, but it adds a layer of indirection.

The unregulated pharmaceuticals distribution market relies on burner phones and seems pretty solid despite effectively continuous attempts to conduct surveillance on them.

Perhaps not something insanely obvious like Grouch Marx moustache and glasses, but more subtle? I'm not really very well aware of how advanced face recognition, etc. is at this point in time though. But I'd guess anyone who cares enough about opsec to go through this process might also be decent at passable disguise techniques.

Check out cvdazzle

Doesn't exactly pass the "more subtle" requirement...

(Perhaps if you arrange to buy your burner from the convenience store next door to a goth club...)

That's just (weird) fashion design. The anti-surveillance thing is an afterthought. And it doesn't work in any case.

you can always hire someone down-and-out or someone that doesn't take part in the normal economy to buy the phone for you, though of course there are risks with that too

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