404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work. Webloc can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or to their employer.
Leave your phone at home.
Archive link because this is too important for people to be turned away by a paywall
The takeaway that I got here is basically that even a burner phone can hypothetically be linked to you, if you take it home with you after a protest. And if you aren’t using a burner phone, they can get so much granular historical data about you that your whole life is laid bare.
And zero warrants required, because of course this needs to be abused as much as possible.
What do normal people even do about this sort of thing? Flock cameras at least can be disabled or hacked, but this? We don’t have access to cell towers nor the ability to choose which we connect to, we don’t meaningfully have the ability to opt out of data tracking.
Thankfully, this particular kind of tracking can be reduced practically to 0 with good informational hygiene: don’t give location permissions to crappy apps. Basically, don’t give it to any app (yes, google apps included), unless you’re absolutely sure this app doesn’t spy on you — or even better — doesn’t have internet access at all. Make it a rule: an app should either access internet or access your location, but never both.
Just means the next step with a burner phone is have it on flight mode until you get there, then turn flight mode back on when you leave?
Or turn it off?
Don’t trust “flight mode”, use a Faraday bag for that purpose.
Truly cyber dystopian shit. Really makes me think about just stop using an smart phone.