How to Make a Secret Phone Call (2015)

[Pulletwee12549]

I think there is confusion between some of the terms he is using. I don't believe this is a secret call so much as one where the parties are unidentified. The contents of the phone can be trapped, and if there is any exchange of identifying information, an investigation can be successful.

With burners at the 7-11 they seem to want buyer information, even with cash. I have yet to find an untraceable burner.

[Tuna-Fish]

> With burners at the 7-11 they seem to want buyer information, even with cash. I have yet to find an untraceable burner.

The way you get an untraceable burner is find the closest junkie, and pay him extra to go purchase you a phone.

[hnarn]

In the current year, I guess the answer is simply "use Signal". I'm not sure I understand why it's so important that it has to be an actual phone call, even for a thought experiment, i.e. it has to go over the phone network to a device with a phone number. If that is the case in any real scenario, it seems a reasonable guess that it's because one or two parties are somehow restricted from using other channels -- and if so, is there any reason to believe that this restriction would not in itself make it simpler to monitor that restricted party, and therefore less secure?

[4bpp]

Even if Signal's assertion that they do not keep metadata is in fact trustworthy, a network-scale adversary (such as a nation-state) could easily figure out that you called someone and who you called by looking at the data exchanged between your phone (which they know) and the Signal servers, and looking what other connections started and ended at the same time as yours and had a similar bandwidth usage profile.

(How many Signal phone calls are even started in any given short window of time, like 1 second?)

[upofadown]

Signal runs off your phone number. So the problem would reduce to the one solved in the article at some level.

[amelius]

Speaking of which, what is the best way to create a throwaway email account?

[FDSGSG]

Tor browser and the email provider of your choice. I find that cock.li makes it particularly easy to create new accounts and does not restrict Tor use.

[ne9xt]

10minutemail.net

[sammachin]

Just use payphones

[PappaPatat]

"Am heutigen Donnerstag, 28. November, wurde in Baden die letzte Schweizer Telefonkabine abmontiert."

Translates to "Today Thursday November 28 (2019) the last payphone in Switzerland was disconnected."

The cool thing with these payphones was that they had their own publicly available number so you could call them. Something I had not seen in other countries.

Source: https://www.nzz.ch/panorama/kein-anschluss-unter-dieser-numm...

[cpach]

This comment prompted me to google. Apparently there are still 100000 pay phones still in operation in the US. In Sweden we have none left.

[tomcooks]

> The CIA’s faulty cell phone tradecraft used in the 2005 extraordinary rendition of Hassan Mustafa Osama in Italy

With "extraordinary" I hope the author means illegal (the 23 CIA operatives cowardly fled Italy to avoid being incarcerated)

[jt0]

Yes, this is what is meant. Specifically: "Extraordinary rendition, also called irregular rendition or forced rendition, is the government-sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another with the purpose of circumventing the former country's laws on interrogation, detention and torture. Such renditions have been carried out (for example) by the United States government."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition

[StavrosK]

Kind of like saying "extraordinary procurement" instead of "theft".

[IntricateJake]

> CIA > illegal

So just another day of work then?