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Technologies Canada - Reporting on the war on your digital rights.

Technologies Canada (http://technologies.ca/)

  • technologies
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    • anonymity
    • hardware
    • bitcoin
  • surveillance
    • law enforcement
    • privacy law
    • advertising
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  • censorship
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    • domain seizures
    • isp filtering
    • app store bans
  • governance
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    • Canada
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  • analysis

How to Set Up a Cheap Burner Phone

By | June 19, 2020

BY MICAH LEE
THE INTERCEPT

If you’re taking to the streets to demand justice for the victims of police brutality and homicide, you may want to leave your phone at home. No matter how peaceful your behavior, you are at risk of getting arrested or assaulted by police. Cops might confiscate your phone and search it regardless of whether or not they’re legally allowed to, or they might try to break it, especially if it contains photos or video of their violent or illegal actions.

At the same time, it’s a good idea to bring a phone to a protest so you can record what’s happening and get the message out on social media. Filming police is completely legal and within your rights, and it’s one of the few tools citizens have against police brutality. It’s also important to be able to communicate with others in real time or to find your friends in case you get separated.

To reconcile this tension — between wanting to protect your privacy and wanting to digitally document protests and police misdeeds — the safest option is to leave your primary phone, which contains a massive amount of private information about you, at home and instead bring a specially prepared burner phone to protests.

I discuss how to do this at length below, and in the video above.

What if I Can’t Afford a Burner Phone?

I bought a Nokia 1.3 smartphone for $99, as well as three months of prepaid phone service for $40. If this is too expensive for you, you may have other options:
•If you have an old phone collecting dust in a drawer, as long as it still works and the battery still holds a charge, you can use this as your burner phone rather than buying a new one. You just need a new SIM card, like one that comes with prepaid cell service. Make sure to factory reset the phone before getting ready to protest.
•There are even cheaper phones and prepaid service options than the ones I chose, and these can work fine as well.
•If you want to avoid paying for phone service for your second phone, depending on your current cell phone provider and what types of phones you have, you may be able to remove the SIM card from your main phone and insert it into your burner phone, and then put it back after the protest. This will cause all calls and texts to temporarily go to your burner phone instead of your main one. You’ll want to make sure the SIM card slot on the second phone can accommodate the size of the SIM card you have on your primary phone.

If a separate burner phone still isn’t an option and you decide you need to bring your primary phone, here are some steps to take to make it safer and less likely for your private data to end up in the hands of the police:
•Disable fingerprint and face unlock, and instead require typing a passcode or password to unlock your phone. This makes it take longer to get into your phone, but it also makes it considerably harder for police to get in without your consent.
•Make sure your passcode or password is not easily guessable. If you’re using a numeric passcode, it should be at least 6 digits, but longer is better.
•Set up a SIM PIN, which prevents police from removing the SIM card from your phone and inserting it into another, which would allow them to take over your phone number. Here are iPhone instructions and Android instructions for doing this. If you set a SIM PIN, you’ll need to type it every time you reboot your phone in addition to your passcode.
•If you’re using Android, make sure your phone’s storage is encrypted (all iPhones have encrypted storage). On most Android phones, you can look in the Settings app, under Security > “Encrypt phone” to find phone encryption settings.
•Disable every smartphone feature that isn’t necessary like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and location services. You can also keep your phone in airplane mode when you don’t need to use the network. This will make your phone leak less information that police can use to track you.

Backdoors that let cops decrypt messages violate human rights, EU court says

BY ASHLEY BELANGER
ARS TECHNICA

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that weakening end-to-end encryption disproportionately risks undermining human rights. The international court’s decision could potentially disrupt the European Commission’s proposed plans to require email and messaging service providers to create backdoors that would allow law enforcement to easily decrypt users’ messages. This ruling came after Russia’s intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service (FSS), began requiring Telegram to share users’ encrypted messages to deter “terrorism-related activities” in 2017, ECHR’s ruling said.

Decentralization Matters: But Why?

BY MIKE MASNICK
TECHDIRT

About a year ago, the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web asked if I would help edit and compile a “magazine” talking about decentralization and why it’s important. It was a fun and interesting challenge, and now the final product is out, the D-Web Digest

Seven ‘no log’ VPN providers leak 1.2TB of user logs

BY SHAUN NICHOLS
THE REGISTER
A string of “zero logging” VPN providers have some explaining to do after more than a terabyte of user logs were found on their servers unprotected and facing the public internet.
This data, we are told, included in at least some cases clear-text passwords, personal information, and lists of websites visited, all for anyone to stumble upon.
It all came to light this week after Comparitech’s Bob Diachenko spotted 894GB of records in an unsecured Elasticsearch cluster that belonged to UFO VPN.

More Headlines

Apple Has A Vladimir Putin Problem
Apple Takes a (Cautious) Stand Against Opening a Killer’s iPhones
She installed a Ring camera in her children’s room for ‘peace of mind.’ A hacker accessed it and harassed her 8-year-old daughter.

Canada

  • Bill C-10 is a ‘Full-blown assault’ on free expression

    BY TRISTIN HOPPER THE VANCOUVER SUN After more than 25 years of Canadian governments pursuing a hands-off approach to the online world, the government of Justin Trudeau is now pushing Bill C-10, a law that would see Canadians subjected to the most regulated internet in the free world. Although pitched as a way to expand Canadian content provisions to the online sphere, the powers of Bill C-10 have expanded considerably in committee, including a provision introduced last week that could conceivably allow the federal government to order the deletion of any Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Twitter upload made by a Canadian.

  • Law prohibiting election misinformation struck down

    By Elizabeth Thompson CBC Politics A key section of Canada's elections law designed to curb misinformation during elections has been struck down and declared unconstitutional. In a 15-page decision, Ontario Superior Court Justice Breese Davies ruled that the section is an unjustifiable restriction on Canadians' right to free speech.

Analysis

  • The Growing Threat to Free Speech Online

    BY DAVID FRENCH TIME MAGAZINE There are times when vitally important stories lurk behind the headlines. Yes, impeachment is historic and worth significant coverage, but it’s not the only important story.

  • Why Americans Should Worry About the New EU Copyright Rules

    BY JULIA REDA, MEP MEDIUM Last spring, 200,000 Europeans took to the streets to protest against a new EU copyright law that risks to restrict online culture and block vast numbers of legal online communications such as memes, reaction gifs, video game reviews or remixes. It is the latest clash between a generation that has grown up with the Internet as a means of cultural expression and a much older generation of lawmakers who prioritize the interests of entertainment companies over online culture.

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