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From an article in the July 21, 2016 Business Insider:
Edward Snowden wants you to know at all times whether the NSA is keeping tabs on your iPhone.
Along with Andrew Huang, his coauthor and fellow hacker, Snowden presented his research on phone "hardware introspection" at MIT [PDF], which aims to give users the ability to see whether their phone is sending out secret signals to an intelligence agency.
In their paper, Snowden and Huang make it clear that what you see on your phone's screen is not always true.
If you turn off Bluetooth or cellular service, the phone's radios and other electronics can still be made to send signals, especially if they are compromised by a sophisticated intelligence agency or hackers. Even airplane mode isn't a defense, since the current version of Apple's iOS still keeps the GPS active while in that state.
"Trusting a phone that has been hacked to go into airplane mode is like trusting a drunk person to judge if they are sober enough to drive," they write.
So instead of trusting the phone's software to tell the user if something is fishy, the pair proposes something else: A device that plugs into the hardware and constantly scans to see whether is transmitting.
Though they think their research can be applied to just about any phone, for right now they are building a device for the 4.7" Apple iPhone 6.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday July 23 2016, @07:35AM
> For navigation, an off-line GPS device
Some of those store a list of one's past destinations; even if one attempts to clear the list, I would guess that traces can remain in the flash memory. A work-around may be to avoid entering one's destination.
Whatever advantages it may offer, "a simple phone" can inform the cellular network of one's location. Recent ones are often fitted with a GPS chip supposedly in furtherance of the provision of emergency services, are they not? Old ones can be located, albeit less accurately, by triangulation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2016, @09:47AM
Yes, but there is no way of mitigating this threat, so it's not really a discussion point. However dumb devices are generally OFF when you take the battery out and pop them in a metal box.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday July 23 2016, @06:28PM
> Yes, but there is no way of mitigating this threat, so it's not really a discussion point.
There's the OP's recommendation to "find a way of NOT using these devices." Cellular networks aren't the only way to communicate, nor are they the only way to make telephone calls. Of course when a cellular network is the only way to communicate there isn't a way to use them without revealing something about one's location. I suppose one could use a highly directional antenna so that only one cell site could pick up one's signal, preventing triangulation. If one were using a USB dongle for data it, rather than using a phone, it wouldn't even require soldering. Of course it would be conspicuous.
I meant to say earlier: along with their many pitfalls, smart-phones do afford the possibility of using encrypted communications and encrypted storage.
> However dumb devices are generally OFF when you take the battery out and pop them in a metal box.
Certainly Apple doesn't offer removable batteries, but there exist smart-phones with a removable battery. Why do you advocate the use of a metal container? Is it because mobiles have a small second battery that ordinarily powers the clock, but could conceivably be used to serve spies' purposes?