Tired of Big Brother myths.. When a cellular is off, its off. Right?

[CJay]

Deep sleep is also nothing bad, yet being labeled as if the phone "never really turns off" (just like any other standby enabled TV etc?). Compared to older phone generations booting just takes too long.

Never said it was a bad thing, just an illustration of the states a smartphone goes into when people think it's 'off' but still has a battery installed.

Still comes down to 'take the battery out' if you're worried about what the phone is up to.

I doubt any EE is knowledgable enough to know what every piece of electronic technology or chip does, but collective knowledge is incredibly powerful. 

[R005T3r]

Kickstart an RF shield that also serves as an over-unity, energy harvesting, fashionable and green protective cover.

you mean this:

[Galenbo]

I miss the old analog cordless phones. When I was a teenager I used to have the frequencies programmed into a scanner and often had it on in the background when we lived in an apartment. Never did anything nefarious with the information heard, it was just just fun. The analog cellphones were easy to listen in on too, the cellular companies lobbied to make it illegal to listen and required those frequencies to be locked out on scanners but it was an un-enforceable law. I've worked on a number of scanners and I've yet to encounter a Pro-2004, 2005 or 2006 that didn't have the cellular mod done.

My attitude on the matter has always been if you don't want me to pick up your transmission, either encrypt it or keep your radio waves off my property.

I remember the times I frequented CB/27mhz friends, one of them modified a cheap AM/FM radio to capture those analog communications.

[David Hess]

Bunnie and Edward Snowden have teamed up to make a phone case cover that tells you if you phone is secretly transmitting.

That will not necessarily be helpful.

Having the phone access the cell network while in bug mode would be very wasteful of operating time and would be more likely to be noticed compared to having it passively record and then transmit once the user turns it on to use it at which point the user will be expecting it to transmit.

I believe the main purpose of the bunnie/Snowden device is to make the phone holder aware if GPS tracking is occuring when the device is "airplane mode" , not to listen in on conversations which I would think they assume is going to happen anyways.  Knowing the location of a journalists cell phone can literally have deadly consequences.

Read the link to bunnie's paper I posted earlier or listen to the Amp Hour or Adafruit interviews and it will be more clear.

Aw, what they did is a lot more sophisticated but it is more than just a phone case and requires hardware modifications to the phone.

It will be interesting in the future when someone does this and catches a compromised phone which can then be analyzed.

[bingo600]

This is supposed to be able to "Kill RF signals"

http://www.ebay.com/itm/182062293897

Make a purse/pocket (remember overlapping seems) , put the pone in the purse.
And i should be unable to leak/get RF signals

/Bingo

[David Hess]

This is supposed to be able to "Kill RF signals"

http://www.ebay.com/itm/182062293897

Make a purse/pocket (remember overlapping seems) , put the pone in the purse.
And i should be unable to leak/get RF signals

Seams have to do more than overlap.  If they lack a continuous conductive connection, then they become a slot antenna which is why they make finger stock and abrasive metal gaskets to join seams in RF enclosures.  It would also be nice to be able to use the phone.

Microwave ovens operate at 2.4 GHz where the wavelength is short enough that the door geometry can be used to make a selective RF choke and no conductive seam is required but older microwave ovens that operated at 900 MHz could not do this; the door would have been too large.  So instead they used finger stock to make a continuous conductive seam.  Unfortunately this did not work out well in practice because the exposed finger stock would get bent up, food stuck to it, etc.

[HAL-42b]

I wonder why these are so popular...




I mean, even Obama likes doing some EMC testing during his lunch breaks...

[rrinker]

 Gets in Faraday Cage then uses Cisco IP phone which has an ethernet cable that SURELY extends outside that cage to a switch somewhere. Brilliant.

[HAL-42b]

Looks like it but I'm sure it has been gutted and some modern equivalent to the STU-III crypto has been installed inside.

http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/motorola/sectel/index.htm


You can trust that a government hell bent on spying on everyone, everywhere, all the time, has this shit figured out.

[CatalinaWOW]

Looks like it but I'm sure it has been gutted and some modern equivalent to the STU-III crypto has been installed inside.

http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/motorola/sectel/index.htm


You can trust that a government hell bent on spying on everyone, everywhere, all the time, has this shit figured out.

Somewhere in government, maybe multiple somewheres there are people who have figured this shit out.  Whether they share that information with the White House, and whether those in the White House listen is a totally different story.