Hacker News Reader

Comment by legrande | Hacker News Reader

Presume any phone you own has malware in it, and adjust your behavior accordingly. This means putting the phone in a Faraday sleeve when not using it, so it can't communicate with a C2, putting black nail varnish on the camera, keeping the phone in another room when having a sensitive conversation, etc

For doing the crimes, use a desktop PC with a TailsOS flash drive and communicate with XMPP with OTR preferably with Intel Management Engine neutered and removed. Do Not use a smartphone or dumbphone for criminal dealings.

View on HN

My preferred method is to skip to the end and just carry around a brick. Attaching a message to it and throwing it is a pretty effective way of communicating, provided the recipient is using windows.

You have to tie a string to it, so you can reclaim it before sending your next message.

You can't remain anonymous if you tie a string.

It helps to onion-route the string through many other people’s hands before retrieving it.

I LOVE MY BRICK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ZU6UMDfgY

But what if they are using linux

Mouldy corn, obviously.

Can't tell if you are being serious or not.

For a certain demographic this is good advice

For criminals, I guess?

Business secrets, political dissidents, journalists. Let’s not start the “if you got nothing to hide” argument

Intelligence agencies are a lot more likely to be using illegal malware than law enforcement. Criminals are actually pretty far down the list of people who should be concerned.

Think political dissidents and groups that support them like citizenlab.org, people working on classified projects - or with geopolitcally important trade secrets (which is actually a pretty broad range), members of the military in times of war - or when working with classified information/going to classified locations, people susceptible to being blackmailed with things like nudes of themselves, and so on and so forth.

Everyone's a criminal. Some just haven't been charged or convicted yet.

Hey, we can't slander or marginalize any group now. Criminals have rights!

This is HN so definitely serious. There are a lot of people with rather distorted views of reality here. Also armchair criminal masterminds apparently.

I’m firmly in Poe’s Law land on this one as well.

>putting the phone in a Faraday sleeve when not using it

Why, so that it can send the accumulated data the next time you're using the phone?

I think the idea is that it can't be tracked, but unless the gyroscope and accelerometers are disabled somehow, at least it won't be tracking in realtime.

> Presume any phone you own has malware in it, and adjust your behavior accordingly. This means putting the phone in a Faraday sleeve when not using it, so it can't communicate with a C2, putting black nail varnish on the camera, keeping the phone in another room when having a sensitive conversation, etc

This solution is of course a nonsolution. It vaguely acknowledges the problem of NSA spying yet does not offer a meaningful collective response to counter it (e.g. pushing for open source movement and technology embedded in an anti-capitalist framework/system).

Found the criminal.

Not hard to do. It would be harder to find a non-criminal.

To anyone downvoting this person, are you sure you've read and completely understood every single law that could technically have you regarded as a criminal?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com