Mother Jones has a long article on surveillance arms manufacturers, their wares, and how they avoid export control laws: > Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have > allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders > and executives have quietly built a phone-tracking empire, with a footprint > extending from the Vatican to the Middle East to Silicon Valley. > > It calls its proprietary system Altamides, which it describes in promotional > materials as “a unified platform to covertly locate the whereabouts of single > or multiple suspects in real-time, to detect movement patterns, and to detect > whether suspects are in close vicinity with each other.”...

Here’s the summary: > We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried > out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite > communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being > broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate > and government communications, private citizens’ voice calls and SMS, and > consumer Internet traffic from in-flight wifi and mobile networks. This data > can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of > consumer-grade hardware. There are thousands of geostationary satellite > transponders globally, and data from a single transponder may be visible from > an area as large as 40% of the surface of the earth...

Researchers have managed to eavesdrop on cell phone voice conversations by using radar to detect vibrations. It’s more a proof of concept than anything else. The radar detector is only ten feet away, the setup is stylized, and accuracy is poor. But it’s a start.

I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones. Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can’t be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory defaults erase data, or is it still recoverable? That is, does the reset erase the old encryption key, or just sever the password that access that key? When the phone is rebooted, are deleted files still available? We need answers for both iPhones and Android phones. And it’s not just the US; the world is going to become a more dangerous place to oppose state power...

The EFF has created an open-source hardware tool to detect IMSI catchers: fake cell phone towers that are used for mass surveillance of an area. It runs on a $20 mobile hotspot.

This is from 404 Media: > The Graykey, a phone unlocking and forensics tool that is used by law > enforcement around the world, is only able to retrieve partial data from all > modern iPhones that run iOS 18 or iOS 18.0.1, which are two recently released > versions of Apple’s mobile operating system, according to documents describing > the tool’s capabilities in granular detail obtained by 404 Media. The > documents do not appear to contain information about what Graykey can access > from the public release of iOS 18.1, which was released on October 28. More ...