this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
388 points (83.4% liked)
Technology
59217 readers
2764 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No. Several Jan 6 participants tried burners and they still got caught because the burners were still linked to their movements and activities and their personal phones were unusually unused/off/immobile for the amount of time the burners were used. You would have to expend a lot of effort to make sure your burner was completely disconnected from yours and your phone’s location, as well as making sure your phone showed signs of appropriate activity in your absence.
Not so easy.
Just having a burner phone works against dragnet surveillance if one is not doing really stupid shit like logging in to one's personal social media accounts from one.
If however it's an actual crime which actually gets investigated by actual criminal investigators, they're going to be coming at it individually and using much more specific techniques than just "use a surveillance warrant to get a list of all mobile phones that connected to certain cell towers at certain points in time and plonk them all on a database to cross-check with similar data from other demonstrations".
You can't just treat a burner phone as a second phone that you have active anywhere near your home, place of work or places you normally frequent and you can't just keep it and keep on using it for a long period of time: the longer one holds on to that burner phone the more data points there will be that can be bulk checked with other, identifyable, data from other sources (say, car tracking data) to find out a more than normal overlap.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if those people with the burner phones had them with them active whilst ridding their personal vehicles which had something like OnStar or were dumb enough to log-in to their Facebook account from them.