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I don't see the problem to begin with. The question with anonymity and data securing always is - "who do you want to protect against?" No matter how you set u

I don't see the problem to begin with. The question with anonymity and data securing always is - "who do you want to protect against?" No matter how you set up Signal it's not going to help you against intelligence agencies - they'll just hack into your Android or use the available backdoors in your I- or Windows Phone. Signal is very good (the best?) to encrypt your messages and to sabotage mass surveillance which aims at content analysis. Also not any random bored Data Scientist at WhatsApp will be able to read your stuff. Controlling your meta-data is absolutely impossible with your day-to-day-smartphone anyway. You'd have to use stolen phones and SIM cards. In my opinion it ALL comes down to establishing online best practices to keep suspicion-independent mass surveillance at bay. The rest is politics - if your police is super corrupt - they'll just break your fingers until you give them access to what they want.

Arnt 11y ago
Try harder. Pretend there's a phone on my desk now that was bought by someone else via ebay and reflashed to cyanogenmod. There actually was, its owner forgot it while visiting, but you can pretend that you're a powerful snooping government and that's my secret phone that you want to hack. Not registered in my name, not purchased by me, maybe there's not even a SIM card in the phone. How do you go about "just hacking into" that phone or using the "available backdoors"?
- blubb-fish 11y ago
  Well, usually there has to be a SIM card in your phone to use it for communication. That SIM card has an ID and sooner or later there is going to be a correlateable pattern - the location of a phone which happens to be close to you very often or simply a voice that can be identified as yours. It depends if NSA wants you and then figures out your alter egos or if its the alter ego they care first about and then they'll try to figure out who's the real ego. What's the satisfaction to be 100% untraceable anyway? The practially and politically relevant idea is to not cater your data to them.
  - 746F7475 11y ago
    >Well, usually there has to be a SIM card in your phone to use it for communication. Isn't the whole point here to only use public WiFi through Tor with the "anonymophone"?
  - Arnt 11y ago
    WLAN is sufficient for a lot of use in some use cases, but that's a digression. The main point is that even if you do have zero-day exploits, just finding the phone can be a big, big hurdle, particularly if you don't know the name of its main user.
- mindslight 11y ago
  The phone still contacts the network for E911 service. Locate the phone on your desk based on signal strength to towers. If the phone moved every day it would be easy to uniquely identify, but even if there's some false positives who cares? Then simply access the application processor through the baseband processor which is likely the same chip and pwnt-by-design given its secretive nature and the stakes. The only reasons we trust Intel processors is because A. we have to, and B. we (think) we can audit all of its communications. Neither of these is true for a cell phone.
  - Arnt 11y ago
    Good point, very good point, but you too are skipping the first hurdle: Learning the name of the phone's user, or even narrowing the number of candidates down from millions to thousands.
dayon 11y ago
Just to clarify, if you use Signal, there is no meta-data. Who you called, who called you, the call times, and so on are hidden. It's like with Tor and how your browsing history isn't saved. All the WIFI network operator can know is that you accessed Signal to make a call / text.
- kobayashi 11y ago
  Uh, I'm not sure about that. TOR uses many layers of obfuscation in its attempt to hide where your traffic is going. I think Signal does no such thing, and this metadata is insecure. Also, I think your mention of browsing history is a non sequitur.

Arnt 11y ago

Try harder. Pretend there's a phone on my desk now that was bought by someone else via ebay and reflashed to cyanogenmod. There actually was, its owner forgot it while visiting, but you can pretend that you're a powerful snooping government and that's my secret phone that you want to hack. Not registered in my name, not purchased by me, maybe there's not even a SIM card in the phone. How do you go about "just hacking into" that phone or using the "available backdoors"?

blubb-fish 11y ago
Well, usually there has to be a SIM card in your phone to use it for communication. That SIM card has an ID and sooner or later there is going to be a correlateable pattern - the location of a phone which happens to be close to you very often or simply a voice that can be identified as yours. It depends if NSA wants you and then figures out your alter egos or if its the alter ego they care first about and then they'll try to figure out who's the real ego. What's the satisfaction to be 100% untraceable anyway? The practially and politically relevant idea is to not cater your data to them.
- 746F7475 11y ago
  >Well, usually there has to be a SIM card in your phone to use it for communication. Isn't the whole point here to only use public WiFi through Tor with the "anonymophone"?
- Arnt 11y ago
  WLAN is sufficient for a lot of use in some use cases, but that's a digression. The main point is that even if you do have zero-day exploits, just finding the phone can be a big, big hurdle, particularly if you don't know the name of its main user.
mindslight 11y ago
The phone still contacts the network for E911 service. Locate the phone on your desk based on signal strength to towers. If the phone moved every day it would be easy to uniquely identify, but even if there's some false positives who cares? Then simply access the application processor through the baseband processor which is likely the same chip and pwnt-by-design given its secretive nature and the stakes. The only reasons we trust Intel processors is because A. we have to, and B. we (think) we can audit all of its communications. Neither of these is true for a cell phone.
- Arnt 11y ago
  Good point, very good point, but you too are skipping the first hurdle: Learning the name of the phone's user, or even narrowing the number of candidates down from millions to thousands.

dayon 11y ago

Just to clarify, if you use Signal, there is no meta-data. Who you called, who called you, the call times, and so on are hidden. It's like with Tor and how your browsing history isn't saved. All the WIFI network operator can know is that you accessed Signal to make a call / text.

kobayashi 11y ago
Uh, I'm not sure about that. TOR uses many layers of obfuscation in its attempt to hide where your traffic is going. I think Signal does no such thing, and this metadata is insecure. Also, I think your mention of browsing history is a non sequitur.