• 0 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2025

help-circle

  • 100% it’s always a question of your resources vs theirs, but you’re dead on to make it harder.

    I’ll just add to also turn it off, pull the SIM, and show in a Faraday bag on your way back too. If the recent reporting about ICE buying location data from ad networks shows anything, it’s that they are interested in a capability of following people to and from protests. Graphene should obviate this by disabling Google Play services by default anyway.

    You should leave your regular phone at home, go to another place, power on your other device, speak your part in public, then travel another location and power off. This provides no consistent start or end location to work with for a particular device.


  • Alright, I already “umm, ackshually’d” someone in this thread but this post in particular hit a nerve with me. The Tor security model is based on 3 hops but does not guarantee 3 different jurisdictions. Their circuit building only takes into account “jurisdiction” in the way we’re using it here if you use guard nodes or specific cases when you cannot access the network directly or look like you’re exiting from a Tor node.

    That said, it’s still a very strong project and security model. And everything you said about spreading out your providers without a single point of failure (or pressure) applies.






  • I’ll address the second objection first regarding the phone or browser. You’re always going to rely on some technology for the solutions that use cryptography, you just can’t do those calculations long-hand realistically. That said, look up frameworks like CTAP that allow a potentially untrusted user terminal, like a browser, to interact with a trusted hardware token. Those hardware tokens can be made fairly tamper-proof, see FIPS authorized Yubikeys, such that the phone is pretty much removed from the attestation process. Yes these can still be stolen, but they make hardware keys that are fingerprint authenticated and the biometric stays on the device. Doesn’t get much more self-sovereign than that.

    The existence of a trusted credential provider is a challenge. Fully self-sovereign credentials need to either be trust on first use or validated against a larger system everyone participates in. Even if we had some system of birth certificates tied to a distributed ledger, we would have to trust the third party recording that certificate in the first place, be it a hospital, doctor, or state entity. These trust and proof systems don’t create the trust, they just allow us to extend that trust from one claimant to a verifier. Whether you place that trust in the state, an individual, or an independent third party is up to you.