How Iran can track and control protesters’ phones: hacked documents
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
“We will send money and weapons so that you can defend yourselves” - the West in one comment
“We will mandate sanctions on your government” - the West in one comment
“We will do nothing just wish you all the best” - the West in one comment
Its easy beeing a underdog, you dont have to provide analysis or better solutions, you dont have to proof that you are not delusional, that those you represent are good (lots of evil ex-empires among todays underdogs), all you have to do is bark and bite.
Even if you have a "desert-mumified" culture like in the middle east, that has adapted to survival in a manmade dessert, without risky progress.
Even landing a western spaceship, proofing things can thrive in the dessert, will not change what people have internalized over the centuries. Rather the local culture rubs off on the spaceship and it begins to rust into the same empire scrap yard.
Things proofen not to work:
* military interventions
* secret service interventions
* cultural nudging (soft power)
* brute force take-overs (colonialism)
Ironically, if humanity goes into desert mode, it brings the desert with it.
You produce lots of offspring for the inevitable war, when crashing into the resource ceiling.
You shun risky capitalist endavours.
You vote for one strong man and against diversity of opinion and culture. (prevents civil war, which is always worser then external warfare).
And we had that in medieval europe too, just listen to a catholic preacher and you can hear the bad times ruleset singing itself praises, less your lineage withers.
A maxed out environment is a trap, preventing complex structures and escape attempts.
@qpqpdbdbqpqp I honestly do not see were my viewpoint is racist. I argue that all of humanity, when run into a ressource spares environment, is behaviour optimized towards this loop.
The "western spaceships" aka iraq and afghanistan were doomed to fail, as all the outside surplus is converted into "catastrophe" preparations or escape plans. Would have done the same in the situation.
Israel might be a exemption for now, but even there the orthodox "survial-mode" culture is taking over the enlightment project form within.
And its universal. As soon as things run out, conservative mindsets take over and all ventures and endavours come to a screeching halt.
Sorry, if the physical limitations and the negative impression it made on humanity, scare you and your idealized view of the world.
For most of europe, it's a traumatic experience that led to dozens of millions of dead young adults, entire cities firebombed and razed to the ground, areas shelled so hard that even today their access is forbidden.
But I'm sure it's much easier from a position of a country that never had a single war on its territory.
See: WWII
each time is worse than the last.
what next, straight up facism?
I wonder how people might obfuscate or rotate their IMEIs, to prevent this kind of tracking and collation?
The whole 2G thing in this article is really outdated, though. So much so that they featured this kind of tracking in The Wire (remember "Stingrays"). But that only really matters for external actors; if the government controls the mobile providers, all of this and much more remains possible.
Of course, you could probably determine identity either from video cameras or, more likely, people using the phone and connecting to various towers, but you if you were diligent you could make it really hard.
Spoofing your IMEI won't do much considering it's tied to your IMSI (sim card). You'd need a burner phone + burner SIM for actual anonymity.
That or leaving your phone at home during protests. Of course, that won't help with automatic face recognition software that the Iranian authorities most certainly have set up in place already, but that's the rough deal of living in a tech-heavy society.
Havent give this too much thought yet but it could work.
Still the way the government acts there this would probably just incriminate others who have nothing to do with their cause.
There's a rumor that you only get 5 within 1 year before you get flagged. Never tried to verify, but I wouldn't be surprised.
One idea that came to my mind is what stops someone from using a foreign SIM with roaming? Assuming of course the SIM isn't tired to your identity?
SIM tower triangulation is only accurate to a hundred meters or more in a large city.
Apps like Briar can allow people to communicate peer to peer.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "blind repeaters"? If that's the usual cheap dumb cellular repeaters one can find on ebay, than they will just cause noise on the cellbands if not properly installed and thus be actively hunted down by the telco as they degrade service.
Where possible, manipulate timing too.
Would this cause total chaos? Yes. Promise telcos the chaos ends when they agree to allow IEMI randomization like most WiFi devices do with MAC addresses today.
We will need some new forms of protest to get our rights to privacy back.
The problem highlighted in the article is that merely changing your phone number isn’t enough if you continue to use the same physical phone.
Airplane mode + Briar. It's really well designed for these situations. You can share the app directly via the app. No need for cellular connections.
Now I don't think the Iran govt has any leverage to force companies to release their sources, nor forcing them to install backdoors on their behalf, but if they found a way to sneak new firmware or system level apps into phones sold there, that would be a possibility.
I am always surprised at how hard it is to network any nearby devices on any hardware or OS compared to sharing files/messages etc via the Internet.
I find not only myself but many of my peers struggle with this. Online is easy to be in an echo chamber where nothing actually gets done. You find acceptance but it is meaningless once you shut off your phone. You find community but it’s brittle and again you shut off your phone and you’re alone.
What we need is a return real life in person social life. Being stuck in online/VR all day is basically a precursor to the matrix.
It helps the people that frequently text in the same room. It helps during natural disasters (including power outages). It helps prevent oppressive governments from shutting down communication. I see these companies talk a lot about promoting democracy, so I want to see them make an open protocol that is installed on all phones that allow this. They have the network effect that's required to do this.
Hell, I think even if Apple or Google just did this others would follow. It cleanly fits into the new privacy + safety narratives both are selling.
We can... but I'll argue, very hard, that we shouldn't. Because it's the wrong technology to solve the problem, being based on the very things that are well targeted, understood, and frequently compromised.
If the problem is "Cell phones are compromised through and through," which I'll argue they are, and Apple's addition of Lockdown to work through the fact that even their best sandboxing efforts have been bypassed argues for as well, then "doing things with cell phones" is a horrible idea, because once either an endpoint is compromised, or a tap is within range, you're still giving your adversaries everything they could desire. Both of those are basically certain in a protest.
This is hogwash because it is the wrong threat model. The encryption in this kind of communication is nearly pointless. If you're trying to organize a protest where you have to be messaging 100+ people then there's no way you can vet everyone. There's going to be a mole. In fact, we saw this with some of the militias at Jan 6th. Despite using Signal their texts got turned over. You just have to turn one person to compromise the system.
Would I rather have the communications encrypted? Hell yeah. I'm that annoying friend that makes everyone use Signal. But it is absurd to think that wire tapped mass communication is worse than no mass communication. Revolutions and protests are won my shear mass. They often show their faces and are demonstrating in a public space (where there are often plenty of cameras: CCT, Police, and the protestors themselves!), so there's no concern about privacy already. Many get arrested, you can't arrest a large group. Arresting everyone would be nearly impossible.
Furthermore, people still use covert speech. People are doing it in Iran right now. People are doing it on highly censored platforms like WeChat. Hell, there's covert speech on Twitter. There's definitely an advantage to using phones rather than going down to the public square and organizing that way. If you think everything is/was organized in back rooms and in complete secrecy, you're gravely misinformed at how these things work in reality.
You have the wrong threat model.
If your location (which implies who you're with) and at least the metadata of your communications (who you communicate with, when, how frequently, how long of messages, etc) are sensitive, I don't believe there's any way to use a cell phone safely for those tasks.
And having grown up before cell phones, I assure you, there are ways to coordinate things offline. We just need to bring them back.
Also be sure that nobody carries cellphones into in-person meetings, otherwise location correlation will associate them.
Correct. Which is why it's good to start cultivating the habits now of "not always having your phone with you, powered on, or connected to the network." If you turn it off right before going somewhere, and that's the only place it's ever off, well, huh. That's interesting. If you're cultivating the forgetful 70 year old approach to cell phones of "I don't know where I left it and I think the battery is dead," so much the better.
Landlines?
> Cardinals Ercole Consalvi and Bartolomeo Pacca issued an edict forbidding all secret societies, to become members of these secret associations, to attend their meetings, or to furnish a meeting-place for such, under severe penalties
It also f.cks with the head with those in power, having secret associations and secret meetings, that is. Having it all out in the open gives them (the authorities) the illusion of control, and, I'd argue, actual control over any significant protest movement. Moving it in the "shadows" is a good tactic because it helps make things blurry and it starts "attaching" doubts to said authorities' monopoly of violence. The authorities will ask themselves: "whom should I punish? where are the revolutionaries? is everyone a revolutionary?", and, as such, that will decrease their legitimacy and their hold on actual power.
Or, they'd somehow manage to control themselves, but would only turn off their cellphone just before they got there. It would be easy to figure out the pattern of a bunch of likely instigators heading to the same location.
Or, people would somehow learn to leave their cellphone at home. If anyone's then stopped by the police not having a cellphone in your pocket would be extremely suspicious in a totalitarian dictatorship.
Even then it's not Italy in the 1800s. There's surveillance cameras on every corner, and you're right back to the problem of no signal being the signal.
Nobody in Naples was filing multiple notices in their local papers before they had a normal meeting with their friends on a Tuesday, but that's what everyone's doing via social media. You can tease out suspicious meetings of any non-trivial size as being those without such a signal.
The only way this is going to work for any amount of time is if it's organized like modern terrorist cells, but that's assuming a lot of steps between angry students staging demonstrations and covert operatives.
Yeah, that's a big no-no, I'm starting to realise it more and more. I honestly don't know if there's a solution to it.
I remember leaving some piece of advice about 10 years ago on this forum about how best to attend an anti-government protest without getting into potential trouble afterwards (in the context of these protests [1]). My advice back then was to take a tram/bus to about 2 or 3 stations away from the location of the protests themselves, and then to walk to said location, that way one would have avoided the security cameras located at the metro stations or in some buses back then.
Nowadays, unfortunately, that piece of advice is null because there are cameras actually everywhere (including at the location of the protests), and the government, if it so desires, has access to them almost at will.
Now you probably won't need to follow the breadcrumb trail of some protestor trying to evade surveillance through the methods you describe, facial recognition will be enough.
And if it isn't completing the puzzle might only take computer time, and not someone in the police forces trying to manually track people down.
The CCP is apparently giddy at the opportunity to help Iran build out these systems, so they're likely state of the art.
Western companies would probably be keen to compete, with the only thing stopping them being the US sanctions. We'll only sell these sort of systems to regimes that respect human rights, like The Netherlands, Romania, and Saudi Arabia.
The book Deep Green Resistance goes into various organizing techniques (agree with them or not, it's a fascinating read on the history of leftist movements with quite a bit in the way of practical techniques), but this is one of the reasons why you need multiple different layers within a group - some core trusted layers, and then what amount to messengers who handle communication with that sort of person, with only what's needed.
And "the silence is the signal" is a reason one really needs to start cultivating these habits in ones social circles of not using social media, not posting everything online, etc. It's long past time to reject the draw of social media as intermediating everything, and either start hosting your own stuff at small scale, or simply not using consumer/networked tech for anything important.
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
Investment in distributed networks, reduces their own access to data about their customers because it would no longer go through their servers, which reduces income, at least for all of the companies that have an advertising business.
I could make this exact same argument about distributed networks. Along with the added selling point of safety, privacy, and security. Chat and share pictures with your friends while camping. Trying to contact your neighbors during a power outage?! There's a lot of angles to sell this.
> Investment in distributed networks, reduces their own access to data about their customers because it would no longer go through their servers
I have some serious doubts. If Google can still collect data you've collected while on airplane mode by just sending it once you reconnect to the network then they can do the same with this. If anything, I think it would increase the amount of data they can gather because it extends the capabilities of how one is able to communicate.
We ought to be re-developing them in a hurry, because cell phones, internet, etc, have all proven themselves quite evil.
No idea about how hard it will be to get the device in Iran.
Or here: https://en.radiofarda.com/a/iran-staellite-jamming-health/29...
"This ability to downgrade users’ speed and network quality is particularly pernicious because it can not only obstruct one’s ability to use their phone, but also make whatever communication is still possible vulnerable to interception."
But when Khamenei dies there is a window of opportunity for Iran to become a military dictatorship instead of the current theocracy.