i’ve been meaning to switch fully to signal, but since not many people where i live wanna switch too, i often tell them to just call me. Is that private enough as a privacy conscious individual?
Not if you hold you phone out in front of you and have a conversation on public transport like a complete arsehole.
No. None of your network traffic is private and you can assume it’s being read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#Usage
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-york-hidden-in-plain-sight/
https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hubs/
https://www.propublica.org/article/a-trail-of-evidence-leading-to-atts-partnership-with-the-nsa
Things like HTTPS (web traffic) are backed by certificate authorities which could be compromised. Your cellular radio traffic is encrypted, with keys controlled by the phone company which has the same problem. It’s been shown in several cases (like the Snowden leaks) that ISPs and tech companies cooperate with the NSA.
That being said, well implemented encryption using sufficiently large keys allows you to communicate over networks even if they are compromised. All of this is only secure as the endpoints. All of the encryption in world doesn’t help you if an adversary has root access to a device in the conversation.
I can’t tell you that you should trust Signal, I’m just a screenname on the Internet. However, if you look at the people who have the authority to directly ask intelligence services about their collection capabilities… those people use Signal.
It’s not worth fully switching to any platform as you’ll lose out on communicating with anyone on those platforms. You may be able to move key friends to signal, but you may need to keep access to WhatsApp and a regular phone even if they’re not your preferred option.
Don’t limit yourself unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Absolutely not. The assumption for telephone networks is this: every call is automatically transcribed and recorded. Further autonomous analysis is done on that transcription and if flagged a human would start listening to the recordings or ask for a live feed. Your telephone is a hot mic.
Americans would point to legal protections, but the intelligence agencies don’t care. If it can be done it is done. Outside of America you’re open game. The NSA has always put forward that autonomous collection by computers is not ‘surveillance’ and therefore not illegal anyway. Other jurisdictions will be using similar arguments.
(If you’re an American and you still want to believe your laws protect you then consider America’s five eyes program and other such intelligence sharing programs. The Australians can surveil the Americans and the Americans can surveil the Australians and it’s all within a legal framework. Then they can share intelligence with one another.)
Public prosecution is often a news item and sometimes the evidence can be enlightening. E.g. the evidence is a recording of a telephone call years before prosecution even began. It’s a rather mundane prosecution too. Nothing remarkable that would warrant elevation towards state actors and their capabilities.
I want to press a point: the apparatus of mass-surveillance is owned by the state, but the products that are generated via that apparatus trickle down to smaller state actors like your local police and the private market. To frame things statically is wrong: my threat model doesn’t involve state actors so I can ignore this. Well, the private market now sells services that previously only state-actors could do.
No they are not. Famously last year it became public knowledge that the built in lawful intercept hardware backdoors across the entire cell phone network and pstn were compromised by “the Chinese”.
FaceTime audio, signal calls and perhaps WhatsApp use encryption in transit, so those backdoors don’t affect them. I don’t know about other data calling methods.
No. Western governments for decades have been running automated keyword systems on all calls listening for phrases like “bomb” and flagging all such calls. Get flagged enough and a human reviews it.
This is done with full cooperation of the big telephone companies and has gone beyond intelligence use to “lawful access” requests from the police. The Snowden revelations were not that this was being done (I mean it’s mentioned in Enemy of the State so it was an open ‘secret’ by 1998) but rather that the NSA was doing this for all internet traffic, for all emails, for webcam sessions, that they were storing things that were not even flagged in a vast database of innocent people who hit no keywords and thus had no reason to be under suspicion. That was the big outrage, that and the hacking and national security letters to big companies and the fact it was all searchable by humans like Snowden (and now with AI can all be analyzed in detail unfortunately to create detailed records on every single living person).
Don’t forget to that your call, regardless of any transmission protection, isn’t private if there’s anyone within earshot of either participant.
Hearing impaired people also prove that even being in earshot isn’t required.
Regular phone calls can be intercepted by state actors and police if they have a warrant (or even without one if you live in Russia, or similar countries).
Phone calls on Signal are encrypted and cannot be intercepted unless one of the parties has a backdoor on their phone, which is the modi operandi of the authorities if they want to intercept such calls.
I live in Italy, planning to move to another EU country, idk how it is here
They are not. The traffic between your phone and the tower is encrypted but beyond that it’s available to anyone who can plug directly into your operator’s systems e.g. the government.
Like traditional phone network “phone” calls? Absolutely not. Assume they’re 100% being recorded and fed into an AI model to look for “crimes” and “terrorism” and to classify you.
I could be completely wrong but I believe this was a big outcome from the Patriot Act. Allowing US government to effectively scan every conversation without warrant.
Nah that’s been around in US since at least the late 90s, at least for phone calls
I’ll just place this here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/04/fbi-recommends-encrypted-messaging-apps-combat-chinese-hackers/
The access allowed the Chinese hackers to access real-time unencrypted calls and text messages, as well as metadata about who the communications were sent to and from, as they traveled over the phone carriers’ networks.
Your phone call records exist forever and can be accessed pretty easily.
Phone call tapping needs a warrant.
International calls are probably tapped always.
There are also security gaps in cellular systems that allow for less judicial methods of gaining information.
Phone call tapping needs a warrant.
This is correct for the US, and I think quite a few others. Generally that req has been upheld in the US.
It is also correct that there is little to no technical protection against intercepting the content. The only protection you have is legal.
Hence why discussions become confusing. You get people insisting there is no protection. They are correct, in a way. Then you get people insisting there is. They are also correct, in a different way. Then, here’s an example of when the legal protection failed, therefore, the legal protection does not exist. Which is generally wrong.
To add even more confusion, the NSA was collecting metadata about the phone calls of over 100M people! Per Snowen’s disclosures,
Under the order, the numbers of both parties on a call, as well as the location data, unique identifiers, time of call, and duration of call were handed over to the FBI, which turned over the records to the NSA
But that is not the same as collecting and processing the audio.
It is important to be specific about the exact thing you are worried about. I live in the USA, and for USA-to-USA conversations over the traditional phone network, I generally do not worry about the audio being interepted without a warrant. Even though my only protection is legal. If I was going to have an extremely sensitive conversation, esp if I was afraid of disclosure of who I talked to, I would chose a different method to talk. But not b/c I think the risk is very high of my phone audio being surveiled. Just from an abundance of caution.
I left WhatsApp and joined signal instead. I did notify most people but two years later not many have left WhatsApp. I do have a more quieter life. Some friends thought I’d ghosted them. Others thought I’d passed away. But to be honest, speaking to friends who work in secure comms companies, there is no such thing as privacy. Everyone in power has access to everyone’s messages and private lives
My friend is in IT/security and has helped me a lot on creating privacy with my data but mostly just laughs and is very discouraging when he sees me trying to hard. He knows what a waste of time it can be.
Normal calls, no matter whether via 5G, 4G, 3G, whatever, even phone wire, are not end-to-end encrypted.
