I feel like anyone serious about doing actual journalism needs to start with a decent Cyber Security 101 course. Does anyone know of one?
1. keep your phone's identifiers secret, as they must target the devices in some way (like phone number/email/whatever)
or
2. don't own a phone
Phone 1 - with sim and is exploited, no data or apps. Phone 2 - different OS, no sim, uses portable hotspot from phone 1 and has all the apps and data.
its an anomaly having an "no data" especially in this ever digitized world
Honestly I don't think this is going to protect you if you are being targeted. We've already seen what can happen with pagers
Not having a phone is nigh on impossible, minimizing phone use isn't quite as bad as you might think. Mine ran out of battery on Monday and I've not charged it all week.
I'm toying with the idea of only using it when I absolutely need to (e.g., for MFA, if I'm out of an evening and likely to need a taxi). Not so much an opsec thing, more that I spend enough time in-front of screens as it is.
The parent comment was flippant, but I think in the context of this piece, phone-use minimization isn't necessarily a bad idea.
Trying to get into multiple systems and corollate/reconstruct information is much more difficult, time consuming, and likely to be much less complete. If a state actor has decided to stop at nothing to get you, it probably wont help, but if you are just someone that could end up on someone’s list, it will likely help.