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A burner phone is a single-use phone, unattached to your identity, which can theoretically be used to communicate anonymously in situations where communications may be monitored. Whether or not using a burner phone is itself a “best practice” is up for debate, but if you’ve made the choice to use one, there are several things you should keep in mind.

Burner phones are not the same as disposable phones.

A burner phone is, as mentioned above, a single-use phone procured specifically for anonymous communications. It is considered a means of clandestine communication, and its efficacy is predicated on having flawless security practices. A disposable phone is one you purchase and use normally with the understanding that it may be lost or broken.

Burner phones should only ever talk to other burner phones.

Using a burner phone to talk to someone’s everyday phone leaves a trail between you and your contact. For the safety of everyone within your communication circle, burner phones should only be used to contact other burner phones, so your relationships will not compromise your security. There are a number of ways to arrange this, but the best is probably to memorize your own number and share it in person with whoever you’re hoping to communicate with. Agree in advance on an innocuous text they will send you, so that when you power your phone on you can identify them based on the message they’ve sent and nothing else. In situations where you are meeting people in a large crowd, it is probably OK to complete this process with your phone turned on, as well. In either case, it is unnecessary to reply to the initiation message unless you have important information to impart. Remember too that you should keep your contacts and your communications as sparse as possible, in order to minimize potential risks to your security.

Never turn your burner on at home.

Since cell phones both log and transmit location data, you should never turn on a burner phone somewhere you can be linked to. This obviously covers your home, but should also extend to your place of work, your school, your gym, and anywhere else you frequently visit.

Never turn your burner on in proximity to your main phone.

As explained above, phones are basically tracking devices with additional cool functions and features. Because of this, you should never turn on a burner in proximity to your “real” phone. Having a data trail placing your ostensibly anonymous burner in the same place at the same time as your personally-identifying phone is an excellent way to get identified. This also means that unless you’re in a large crowd, you shouldn’t power your burner phone on in proximity to your contacts’ powered-up burners.

Don’t refer to yourself or any of your contacts by name.

Given that the purpose of using a burner phone is to preserve your anonymity and the anonymity and the people around you, identifying yourself or your contacts by name undermines that goal. Don’t use anyone’s legal name when communicating via burner, and don’t use pseudonyms that you have used elsewhere either. If you must use identifiers, they should be unique, established in advance, and not reused.

Consider using an innocuous passphrase to communicate, rather than using names at all. Think “hey, do you want to get brunch Tuesday?” rather than “hey, this is Secret Squirrel.” This also allows for call-and-response as authentication. For example, you’ll know the contact you’re intending to reach is the correct contact if they respond to your brunch invitation with, “sure, let me check my calendar and get back to you.” Additionally, this authentication practice allows for the use of a duress code, “I can’t make it to brunch, I’ve got a yoga class conflict,” which can be used if the person you’re trying to coordinate with has run into trouble.

Beware of IMSI catchers.

One reason you want to keep your authentication and duress phrases as innocuous as possible is because law enforcement agencies around the world are increasingly using IMSI catchers, also known as “Stingrays” or “Cell Site Simulators” to capture text messages and phone calls within their range. These devices pretend to be cell towers, intercept and log your communications, and then pass them on to real cell towers so your intended contacts also receive them. Because of this, you probably don’t want to use your burner to text things like, “Hey are you at the protest?” or “Yo, did you bring the Molotovs?”

Under normal circumstances, the use of encrypted messengers such as Signal can circumvent the use of Stingrays fairly effectively, but as burner phones do not typically have the capability for encrypted messaging (unless you’re buying burner smartphones), it is necessary to be careful about what you’re saying.

Burner phones are single-use.

Burner phones are meant to be used once, and then considered “burned.” There are a lot of reasons for this, but the primary reason is that you don’t want your clandestine actions linked. If the same “burner” phone starts showing up at the same events, people investigating those events have a broader set of data to build profiles from. What this means is, if what you’re doing really does require a burner phone, then what you’re doing requires a fresh, clean burner every single time. Don’t let sloppy execution of security measures negate all your efforts.

Procure your burner phone carefully.

You want your burner to be untraceable. That means you should pay for it in cash; don’t use your debit card. Ask yourself: are there surveillance cameras in or around the place you are buying it? Don’t bring your personal phone to the location where you buy your burner. Consider walking or biking to the place you’re purchasing your burner; covering easily-identifiable features with clothing or makeup; and not purchasing a burner at a location you frequent regularly enough that the staff recognize you.

Never assume burner phones are “safe” or “secure.”

For burner phones to preserve your privacy, everyone involved in the communication circle has to maintain good security culture. Safe use of burners demands proper precautions and good hygiene from everyone in the network: a failure by one person can compromise everyone. Consequently, it is important both to make sure everyone you’re communicating with is on the same page regarding the safe and proper use of burner phones, and also to assume that someone is likely to be careless. This is another good reason to be careful with your communications even while using burner phones. Always take responsibility for your own safety, and don’t hesitate to erase and ditch your burner when necessary.

— By Elle Armageddon

Choosing the Proper Tool for the Task: Assessing Your Encryption Options

So, you’ve decided to encrypt your communications. Great! But which tools are the best? There are several options available, and your comrade’s favorite may not be the best for you. Each option has pros and cons, some of which may be deal breakers—or selling points!—for you or your intended recipient. How, then, do you decide which tools and services will make sure your secrets stay between you and the person you’re sharing them with, at least while they’re in transit?

Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need the same tool for every situation; you can choose the right one for each circumstance. There are many variables that could affect what constitutes the “correct” tool for each situation, and this guide can’t possibly cover all of them. But knowing a little more about what options are available, and how they work, will help you make better-informed decisions.

Signal

Pros: Signal is free, open source, easy to use, and features a desktop app, password protection for Android, secure group messages. It’s also maintained by a politically-conscious nonprofit organization, and offers: original implementation of an encryption protocol used by several other tools, ephemeral (disappearing) messages, control over notification content, sent/read receipts—plus it can encrypt calls and offers a call-and-response two-word authentication phrase so you can verify your call isn’t being tampered with.

Cons: Signal offers no password protection for iPhone, and being maintained by a small team means fixes are sometimes on a slow timeline. Your Signal user ID is your phone number, you may have to talk your friends into using the app, and it sometimes suffers from spotty message delivery.

Signal certainly has its problems, but using it won’t make you LESS secure. It’s worth noting that sometimes Signal messages never reach their endpoint. This glitch has become increasingly rare, but Signal may still not be the best tool for interpersonal relationship communications when emotions are heightened! One of Signal’s primary problems is failure to recognize when a message’s recipient is no longer using Signal. This can result in misunderstandings ranging from hilarious to relationship-ending. Additionally, Signal for Desktop is a Chrome plugin; for some, this is a selling point, for others, a deal breaker. Signal for Mac doesn’t offer encryption at rest, which means unless you’ve turned it on as a default for your computer, your stored saved data isn’t encrypted. It’s also important to know that while Signal does offer self-destructing messages, the timer is shared, meaning that your contact can shut off the timer entirely and the messages YOU send will cease to disappear.

Wickr

Pros: Wickr offers free, ephemeral messaging that is password protected. Your user ID is not dependent on your phone number or other personally identifying info. Wickr is mostly reliable and easy to use—it just works.

Cons: Wickr is not open source, and the company’s profit model (motive) is unclear. There’s also no way to turn off disappearing messages.

Wickr is sometimes called “Snapchat for adults.” It’s an ephemeral messaging app which claims to encrypt your photos and messages from endpoint to endpoint, and stores everything behind a password. It probably actually does exactly what it says it does, and is regularly audited, but Wickr’s primary selling point is that your user login is independent from your cell phone number. You can log in from any device, including a disposable phone, and still have access to your Wickr contacts, making communication fairly easy. The primary concern with using Wickr is that it’s a free app, and we don’t really know what those who maintain it gain from doing so, and it should absolutely be used with that in mind. Additionally, it is worth keeping in mind that Wickr is suboptimal for communications you actually need to keep, as there is no option to turn off ephemeral messaging, and the timer only goes up to six days.

Threema

Pros: Threema is PIN-protected, offers decent usability, allows file transfers, and your user ID is not tied to your phone number.

Cons: Threema isn’t free, isn’t open source, doesn’t allow ephemeral messaging, and ONLY allows a 4-digit PIN.

Threema’s primary selling point is that it’s used by some knowledgeable people. Like Wickr, Threema is not open source but is regularly audited, and likely does exactly what it promises to do. Also like Wickr, the fact that your user ID is not tied to your phone number is a massive privacy benefit. If lack of ephemerality isn’t a problem for you (or if Wickr’s ephemerality IS a problem for you), Threema pretty much just works. It’s not free, but at $2.99 for download, it’s not exactly prohibitively expensive for most users. With a little effort, Threema also makes it possible for Android users to pay for their app “anonymously” (using either Bitcoin or Visa gift cards) and directly download it, rather than forcing people to go through the Google Play Store.

WhatsApp

Pros: Everyone uses it, it uses Signal’s encryption protocol, it’s super straightforward to use, it has a desktop app, and it also encrypts calls.

Cons: Owned by Facebook, WhatsApp is not open source, has no password protection and no ephemeral messaging option, is a bit of a forensic nightmare, and its key change notifications are opt-in rather than default.

The primary use case for WhatsApp is to keep the content of your communications with your cousin who doesn’t care about security out of the NSA’s dragnet. The encryption WhatsApp uses is good, but it’s otherwise a pretty unremarkable app with regards to security features. It’s extremely easy to use, is widely used by people who don’t even care about privacy, and it actually provides a little cover due to that fact.

The biggest problem with WhatsApp appears to be that it doesn’t necessarily delete data, but rather deletes only the record of that data, making forensic recovery of your conversations possible if your device is taken from you. That said, as long as you remain in control of your device, WhatsApp can be an excellent way to keep your communications private while not using obvious “security tools.”

Finally, while rumors of a “WhatsApp backdoor” have been greatly exaggerated, if WhatsApp DOES seem like the correct option for you, it is definitely a best practice to enable the feature which notifies you when a contact’s key has changed.

Facebook Secret Messages

Pros: This app is widely used, relies on Signal’s encryption protocol, offers ephemeral messaging, and is mostly easy to use.

Cons: You need to have a Facebook account to use it, it has no desktop availability, it’s kind of hard to figure out how to start a conversation, there’s no password protection, and your username is your “Real Name” as defined by Facebook standards.

Facebook finally rolled out “Secret Messages” for the Facebook Messenger app. While the Secret Messages are actually pretty easy to use once you’ve gotten them started, starting a Secret Message can be a pain in the ass. The process is not terribly intuitive, and people may forget to do it entirely as it’s not Facebook Messenger’s default status. Like WhatsApp, there’s no password protection option, but Facebook Secret Messages does offer the option for ephemerality. Facebook Secret Messages also shares the whole “not really a security tool” thing with WhatsApp, meaning that it’s fairly innocuous and can fly under the radar if you’re living somewhere people are being targeted for using secure communication tools.

There are certainly other tools out there in addition to those discussed above, and use of nearly any encryption is preferable to sending plaintext messages. The most important things you can do are choose a solution (or series of solutions) which works well for you and your contacts, and employ good security practices in addition to using encrypted communications.

There is no one correct way to do security. Even flawed security is better than none at all, so long as you have a working understanding of what those flaws are and how they can hurt you.

— By Elle Armageddon