
How to Make a Secret Phone Call (2015) - CapitalistCartr
https://www.fastcompany.com/3044637/secret-phone-network
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Pulletwee12549
I think there is confusion between some of the terms he is using. I don't
believe this is a secret call so much as one where the parties are
unidentified. The contents of the phone can be trapped, and if there is any
exchange of identifying information, an investigation can be successful.

With burners at the 7-11 they seem to want buyer information, even with cash.
I have yet to find an untraceable burner.

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Tuna-Fish
> With burners at the 7-11 they seem to want buyer information, even with
> cash. I have yet to find an untraceable burner.

The way you get an untraceable burner is find the closest junkie, and pay him
extra to go purchase you a phone.

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hnarn
In the current year, I guess the answer is simply "use Signal". I'm not sure I
understand why it's so important that it has to be an actual phone call, even
for a thought experiment, i.e. it _has_ to go over the phone network to a
device with a phone number. If that is the case in any real scenario, it seems
a reasonable guess that it's because one or two parties are somehow restricted
from using other channels -- and if so, is there any reason to believe that
this restriction would not in itself make it simpler to monitor that
restricted party, and therefore less secure?

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4bpp
Even if Signal's assertion that they do not keep metadata is in fact
trustworthy, a network-scale adversary (such as a nation-state) could easily
figure out that you called someone and who you called by looking at the data
exchanged between your phone (which they know) and the Signal servers, and
looking what other connections started and ended at the same time as yours and
had a similar bandwidth usage profile.

(How many Signal phone calls are even started in any given short window of
time, like 1 second?)

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close04
Perhaps this would be another way to obfuscate the collection of metadata with
techniques similar to anti-fingerprinting in Tor. An app like Signal could
sync the time across all parties and send/receive all data in predetermined
packet sizes and at predetermined delivery times across vast enough segments
of their network. This would in theory make it a lot harder to infer who are
the partners in a specific conversation based on timestamps and traffic
volume.

The mechanism for picking the interval and packet size is debatable as long as
the entropy of these values is low enough (does not allow for uniquely
identifiable values). Maybe randomly from a list of predetermined values,
taking into account some priority you set in advance, the size of the message,
or the network conditions.

If every client/server on the network sent and received the data in synced
identically looking bursts it might raise the bar for successful metadata
analysis. Any chance Signal or any other app already do this?

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gruez
Is approach is going to kill battery life because the phone has to be always
online to receive those times transmission.

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ghostpepper
Most modern CPUs/SoCs spend most of their time (ideally) asleep or trying to
go to sleep, and then waking at predefined intervals to transmit data. As long
as this interval could be synchronized to some multiple of the transmission
interval I don't think this would negatively impact battery life.

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amelius
Speaking of which, what is the best way to create a throwaway email account?

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FDSGSG
Tor browser and the email provider of your choice. I find that cock.li makes
it particularly easy to create new accounts and does not restrict Tor use.

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sammachin
Just use payphones

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PappaPatat
"Am heutigen Donnerstag, 28. November, wurde in Baden die letzte Schweizer
Telefonkabine abmontiert."

Translates to "Today Thursday November 28 (2019) the last payphone in
Switzerland was disconnected."

The cool thing with these payphones was that they had their own publicly
available number so you could call them. Something I had not seen in other
countries.

Source: [https://www.nzz.ch/panorama/kein-anschluss-unter-dieser-
numm...](https://www.nzz.ch/panorama/kein-anschluss-unter-dieser-nummer-die-
letzte-telefonkabine-ist-verschwunden-ld.1519927)

~~~
chasd00
way back in the day, it use to be a thing to hang out at payphones. your
friends could call you there.

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tomcooks
> The CIA’s faulty cell phone tradecraft used in the 2005 extraordinary
> rendition of Hassan Mustafa Osama in Italy

With "extraordinary" I hope the author means illegal (the 23 CIA operatives
cowardly fled Italy to avoid being incarcerated)

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StavrosK
Kind of like saying "extraordinary procurement" instead of "theft".

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Chirael
It was the least untruthful thing he could say.

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StavrosK
Plus it sounds like someone played Hamlet extremely well.

"You should have seen that rendition... It was... extraordinary."

