Best Handset For Freedom?

Father Thomas Dowd writes "The images we are seeing of Iran are being captured on cell phones and the text is being twittered over SMS. Still, the government has some control over the networks, and we are all familiar with fears of wiretap technologies to spy on users. If the cell phone is the new tool of freedom, what would the best 'freedom handset' contain? I'm thinking of a device with an open OS, where each phone could be a router for encrypted messages passed through Bluetooth/WiFi/whatever, thereby totally bypassing physical infrastructures when necessary. Of course, some sort of plausible deniability encryption a la Truecrypt would also be good, in case the secret police catch you with your phone. What else might we need?"

Comments

First thing that comes to mind

[DirtyCanuck]

Most likely the next logical step for rural and otherwise disconnected people would be satellite. However currently it is cost prohibitive for the average person.

So the best handset for this purpose would be satellite capable.

There's cheaper and less limited way...

[sznupi]

Step 1: Get cheapest phone you can find with GPRS and USB. Right now that would be probably LG KP100 - a little over $20 without contract. Use this phone only for "secret" communication, with prepaid SIM cards.

Step 2: A netbook. Usual rules of secretiveness apply - make sure it doesn't transmit any identifiable information, keep "secret" OS separate and on a microSD card, transmit through Tor, and so on...

Idea about sending old digital cameras

[FleaPlus]

On a related note, earlier today I was wondering if it would be useful if it would be useful to send old digital cameras to places like Iran and other regions where oppression is occurring (perhaps distributed by international media offices?). Just counting myself, I have 3-4 pocket-size digital cameras which are sitting around collecting dust. As a result, many more of the protesters and bystanders would have cameras, and would be able to capture evidence of violence and oppression. Even if they don't have internet proxy access (or a computer), they could give their memory card to someone who does have one. Of course, there's already some videos being leaked out (NOTE: videos are quite graphic) in defiance of the regime, but increasing the number of available photos and videos by an order of magnitude or two would be a game-changer.

Of course, I have no idea how you'd go about starting to organize something like that, but I wanted to seed the idea in case it's worthwhile.

Re:Idea about sending old digital cameras

[im_thatoneguy]

Society has become soft. A few hundred years ago, whole populations would gladly give up their lives for a cause they believed in. Now it seems like that this number is down to a select few.

I think it's more cultural than temporal.

I've been reading that Martyrdom is an important aspect of Iranian culture and mythology. One of their 'founding fathers' was martyred by a tyrannical government. As such there is great respect and emotional power to someone being killed by the government in a protest. The Iranian Revolution was largely a series of ever growing 'vigils' for the fallen martyrs taken and killed by the Government. Every person killed brings more people to the next vigil. Popular opinion finally completely overwhelms the government as it simply becomes an armed but unrecognized squatter by the people. Iran is also very young. Youngsters tend to be more active and impatient for culture and political change.

China on the other hand is/was a demographically older nation. They also have a strong tradition of respect for authority even in democratic nations such as Japan. As such I would extrapolate that there isn't the same sort of tradition of rebellion and insurrection as we have in Western Cultures. The Tienanmen demonstraters were largely students. They were largely unorganized and they didn't have the organization or precedent for change. It was a case of a culture being inconducive to revolution. But it's largely a question of details. The same eastern "people before self" mantra presents itself dramatically differently in Buddhist nations where self immolation is an accepted form of demonstration. The ego matters so little that people relatively readily give their lives for a cause (after all if you're just going to reincarnate what does it really matter?) (On an off topic this creates very very interesting traffic systems.)

If you go back a few hundreds years in Western Cultures we also had dramatically less stomach for insurrection and opposition. The state was endorsed by God. We were good God fearing people and to question the state was the question the divine.

I suspect the reason people are less ready to give their lives in western cultures is because our governments are relatively stable Go back a little over 100 years and I think you would find that Americans of the North and South were more than ready to give up their lives by the hundreds of thousands for a cause.

Also patriotism sent millions of young men over seas not more than 50 years ago filled with nationalistic pride. I'm not quite certain when you think we became 'soft'.

Go with the Flow

[Comatose51]

Don't avoid the cellular networks just because the government controls them. If you go on your own frequency, they will just jam it. What you want to do is to piggy back on something else that would be too expensive for them to shut down. This might be too contrarian but I say use the cellular network but disguise your traffic so they can't sniff it out. In the end that leaves them with only the option of shutting down the entire cellular network, which they wouldn't be able to function without as well. Remember when Blackberry lost the patent lawsuit and how businesses and the government started freaking out? Use their tools against them. Hop on their frequencies. Guerrilla tactics! Blend in.

The Grotesquely Ugly Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

In the absence of an external interfering force (e. g., the army of the Soviet Union), the fate of a nation is determined by its people. Period.

After the Kremlin exited Eastern Europe, the peoples of each nation in Eastern Europe rapidly established a genuine democracy and a free market. Except for Romania (where its people killed their dictator), there was no violence.

In Iran (and many other failed states), no external force is imposing the current brutal government on the Iranians. The folks running the government are Iranian. The president is Iranian. The secret police are Iranian. The thugs who will torture and kill democracy advocates are Iranian.

If the democracy advocates attempt to establish a genuine democracy in Iran, violence will occur. Why? A large percentage of the population supports the brutal government and will kill the democracy advocates.

Let us not merely condemn the Iranian government. We must condemn Iranian culture. Its product is the authoritarian state.

We should not intervene in the current crisis in Iran. If the overwhelming majority of Iranians (like the overwhelming majority of Poles) truly support democracy, human rights, and peace with Israel, then a liberal Western democracy will arise -- without any violence. Right now, the overwhelming majority clearly oppose the creation of a liberal Western democracy. The Iranians love a brutal Islamic theocracy.

The Iranians created this horrible society. It is none of our business unless they attempt to develop nuclear weapons. We in the West are morally justified in destroying the nuclear-weapons facilities.

Note that, 40 years ago, Vietnam suffered a worse fate (than the Iranians) at the hands of the Americans. They doused large areas of Vietnam with agent orange, poisoning both the land and the people. Yet, the Vietnamese do not channel their energies into seeking revenge (by, e. g., building a nuclear bomb) against the West. Rather, the Vietnamese are diligently modernizing their society. They will reach 1st-world status long before the Iranians.

Cultures are different. Vietnamese culture and Iranian culture are different. The Iranians bear 100% of the blame for the existence of a tyrannical government in Iran. We should condemn Iranian culture and its people.

Re:There's only one obvious choice...

[im_thatoneguy]

All of this is kind of a moot point to me. If you need all of this encryption what you really need a few dozen million of your closest friends to demand change. The Iranian Revolution took place with no cell phones or internet. The Berlin wall fell without twitter. China still has Twitter and YouTube but it hasn't facilitated a popular movement for mass change.

Twitter has been fun for CNN to browse all day but as far as an organizational tool and effective means of rebellion I imagine its actual use has been extremely overblown. People could have just as easily emailed these news posts directly to news organizations, bloggers and friends. And considering most of the important ones have been longer than 140 characters I suspect emailing is still the preferred means of communicating the current state of Iran.

I hear a lot of about twitter but I haven't heard any useful news with it cited as a source.

Re:Open source smart phone

[david.given]

No, that's not what I mean. You can't make phone calls on it without talking to the GSM protocol stack. The GSM stack runs on the radio processor, and is closed source. It's not in the git repository. The GP had said that because it had recompiled all the software on the phone; it hadn't, it'd only recompiled the stuff that runs on the radio processor.

So in order to be able to make phone calls, it has to run untrusted software (that could well be snooping the memory space of the application processor and sending his credit card details off to the New World Order using GSM debug packets). The same applies for the DSP firmware and the GPU, assuming the G1's GPU is programmable.

In order for the GP to completely trust its phone, it would have to remove the GSM protocol stack completely, and therefore lose the ability to make phone calls.

Re:Open source smart phone

[david.given]

They did, but that is not at all what you did. You tried to say the microcode running on the radio is part of all the software. When people say that, they don't mean microcode. Not on the radio, and not in the CPU core.

Right. But the OP specifically said that it had recompiled its OS and had verified that none of it was sending data to unauthorised sources. But the OP hadn't checked the radio, and wouldn't be able to, because the radio is a binary blob. Which means that it could have been sending data anywhere, for all the OP knew; the radio sees all data going over the air, knows exactly where you are, and has access to big chunks of the device's physical memory (which means it could probably, if it wanted to, snoop the application processor's workspace). If I were the DHS and wanted to know where every citizen was at all times, that's where I'd put my code.

'Microcode' is a misnomer; the G1 radio processor runs a twenty megabyte operating system image. It's not a small or simple thing. Anything could be happening in there.

(Usually these things are encrypted to prevent people from looking inside; the G1's isn't, though, and running strings on it shows that it seems to be the OKL4 variant of the Pistachio L4 OS. That's unusual --- things like VxWorks or Nucleus are more common. If you're interested in these things it's actually worth a look; there are a lot of interesting comments in there.)

My point is that being able to audit the obvious source code gives you nothing. Computers these days aren't simple CPUs attached to memory any more. If you're going to trust T-Mobile's radio stack you might as well trust the main OS as well. Auditing the main OS (which is, in itself, a task beyond most humans) without also auditing the radio stack gains you nothing.

Who is the idiot?

[hey!]

The idiot is the person who thinks he can secure liberty for himself alone.

The time to worry about plausible deniability is before the secret police catch you. And make sure everyone knows the drill too. In the face of the secret police "individual liberty" has no practical utility.

Even an oppressive state can't kill everyone. That's the game going on in the streets of Tehran today. The protesters want to nucleate into a crowd so big that it can't be dispersed without killing lots of people. The government doesn't want to do that, because in Iran that means funerals, which are ready made protest rallies. The government wants to keep the crowds isolated and intimidated so that it doesn't end up signing its own death warrant.

The key to effective oppression is intimidation. The key to defeating oppression is to gather so many people together they can't be intimidated.

Re:Also, Father Dowd,

[lwsimon]

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."

-Ghandi