takeheart wrote
Reply to comment by ghast in Twitter thread where Snowden describes how he would use a smartphone if he had to by ghast
I've read the article. A few thoughts.
If trusting airplane mode is like trusting a drunk to judge if they are sober to drive, then a more secure smartphone would be like a driver trained to drive well enough when drunk. If your threat model assumes you might be hit by artillery fire from state military, then the tools you should use must be military grade. Yet right after that the article picks iphone for their introspection, not because any security issues, but because apparently it's the most common tool meeting preferences and tastes of people dodging artillery fire daily. I have to wonder, who really killed those thousands of journalists, did armed hitmen contributed more or less to the bloodbath than apple's office slaves? The whole premise of inspecting iphone to reduce political murders is wrong. Journos themselves should know better than cryptographers about how much you can trust corporate cocksuckers with your safety. "Asking reporters deep in war zones to carry a separate camera, audio recorder, and word processor to avoid surveillance" would be the obvious practical solution, modern devices can be as compact as smartphone and simply better at their intended purpose, yet the article ditches this solution as a matter of fact. Why? Why are they going along with the murderers by trying to convince their victims to carry the death mark? Making it introspectable does not change the nature of death mark.
What follows is the largest part of article with a ton of technical data on killphone, all on the wrong premise. Didn't you say reporters shouldn't be cryptographers? Now you're feeding them like radiologists, hardware engineers, soldering technicians, forensics experts, and more all to make them more (un)comfortable with their death mark? It DOES fairly shows that the device in question is a tracking monstrosity, but only to those verily technically educated.
After hearing whole performance it sounds like this: in act one solo sings "artillery dodgers - keep using iphone", in act two orchestra plays "hackers and corporate cocksuckers, you've got work to do". In the finale it throws a couple jokes "android is worse, buy iphone" and "tor is safe". And only after the bullshit is over you may hear a single cry from the audience if you're lucky. "Don't use smartphone, you don't have to"
ghast OP wrote
Some journalists who read the article or twitter thread might decide to go without. But I think the reason many journalists are willing to risk bringing their phone amount to more than just the reasons Snowden mentioned (camera, microphone, and word processor). There’s the risk of government hacking but there are also various safety benefits to having a phone while traveling in a dangerous area in a foreign country. (Having a map of the area in a compact form, being able to message someone to request help if something has gone wrong, being able to look up local businesses, call a taxi service etc.) If Snowden just told journalists “don’t carry a smartphone” I think that message would largely be ignored for this reason. That might have been the reason they went with that iPhone too… probably figured it’s best to make mass adoption easier than give advice that won’t be listened too.
You’re right that the introspection engine turned out to be “too much” for most journalists. If I ran a newspaper and wanted journalists to use the introspection engine and/or remove internal microphones to replace with external mics, I’d assign it as a task to someone from IT to set that up on the phones of all the journalists who want it. But yeah, I was watching a video by the guy who Snowden collaborated with on this project (Andrew "bunnie" Huang ). He said he found out out that journalists need something that’s super straightforward to use. Afterwards he started working on another project called Betrusted which will be more straightforward for journalists. Betrusted looks interesting but it’s not finished yet. I was actually looking into it recently and didn’t realize the same guy was behind it. I’m going to post a video which where he talks about some other reasons for why he’s working on Betrusted. (Open Source is Insufficient to Solve Trust Problems in Hardware).
He said Edward Snowden came to him with this problem of journalists getting killed and asked him for a solution and the introspection engine is what he came up with. I think “bunnie” fell victim to this bias when assuming this is something journalists would be happy to use if they’re just shown how. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
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