Just want to let you know your cell phone is tracking you regardless if you have it in airplane mode or not. It even ping’s when it’s turned off. There is only one way to know for sure that you are not being tracked. That’s to keep all signals from coming out or going into your devices.
“Today, Randy Zar, CEO of Faraday pouch manufacturer SLNT wrote:” buy my Faraday bags because NSA can track you even with the phone off, for which I don’t give you any evidence.
By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this “The Find,” and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit.
Found this Slate article from 2013. This method only works on devices with malware. Prevention is key!
It is not explained in the report exactly how this technique worked. But to spy on phones when they are turned off, agencies would usually have to infect the handset with a Trojan that would force it to continue emitting a signal if the phone is in standby mode, unless the battery is removed. In most cases, when you turn your phone off—even if you do not remove the battery—it will stop communicating with nearby cell towers and can be traced only to the location it was in when it was powered down.
I mean yeah this is was what i was looking up just now as well. Obviously if you have infected the device the possibilities get pretty wild and you can fake a switch off.
I mean technically power on LAN and power on time etc all exist and one could utilize such things to activate a device again without the user really knowning immediately too.
Using a faraday bag can be a good method to protect yourself if you have such threat model and have to bring your phone and if you actually have to keep your location of the radar.
The original method to do so was discovered in 2004
The WaPo gave this as an anecdote - and didn’t specify if it was still working (in 2013)
Edit: I edited the title slightly, having no reliable and recent source, I personnaly think this is misleading. They maybe could, but saying they can is false.
Remember: if you’re in a secret meeting, no faraday cage or microwave oven is going to prevent the phone from eavesdropping via its mic, and storing everything until it is again connected to the network.
Also microwaves don’t block your phone at all anyway based on my testing. That’s what worries me about these companies, we’re just sort of taking their claims at face value without testing. We really don’t know how effective they even are. And like you said, what’s the point when you can just leave your phone at home if you don’t want it tracking you.
There’s companies that make faraday bags for law enforcement but I don’t think the public is able to buy them.
This is a pretty paranoid rant, but remember that putting a phone in a faraday cage doesn’t stop:
-Your vehicle telemetry from giving away your driving patterns. Use a scooter, bus, walk, or bike for this.
-LEA from putting a GPS beacon on your car.
-The facial recognition cameras across the city from tracking you.
-Footprints, DNA from sheds of hair and skin you leave giving away that you were at a certain location at a certain time.
-An advanced adversary using accelerometer and gyroscope data to reconstruct your movements like INS on a missile, especially if your phone was already infected with malware that records this. Although I am not familiar of malware in the wild taking advantage of this.
Also, this can actually attract more attention from police services, which may be the opposite from what you want, because a phone “randomly turning off” and appearing in another location repeatedly is very anomalous behavior.
In the modern age, stealth is more of a matter of “blending in”, not going dark which could appear as an anomaly which attractions further scrutiny.
Maybe just leave your phone at home?
This is rather complicated for an average techie due to how modern phones are constructed, and an adversary could still use a smartphone’s gyroscope as a microphone to pick up sound below <200GHz on android.
Since people are so far away it’s more practical to use gait recognition. Don’t even need to be facing the camera or wearing the same clothes over time.
This is an already debunked narrative. I highly doubt anyone is going to get in trouble for seeking privacy.
There is no blending in.If you are like your average joe, then you will be fully tracked and (almost) everything will be known about you.
On the other hand, if you are “A private invidual” that take measures to protect their privacy, then yes this will be known about you. But (almost) nothing else.
You can literally find public information that the NSA flagged linux forum users and people searching information on Tor and Tails were flagged for extra surveillance.
Its possible and often preferable to leak some ordinary-looking activity, while leaving a window for actions that should not be attributed to you.