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Volunteers Around the World Build Surveillance-Free Cellular Network Called 'Sopranica' (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: Motherboard's Daniel Oberhaus spoke to Denver Gingerich, the programmer behind Sopranica, a DIY, community-oriented cell phone network. "Sopranica is a project intended to replace all aspects of the existing cell phone network with their freedom-respecting equivalents," says Gingerich. "Taking out all the basement firmware on the cellphone, the towers that track your location, the payment methods that track who you are and who owns the number, and replacing it so we can have the same functionality without having to give up all the privacy that we have to give up right now. At a high level, it's about running community networks instead of having companies control the cell towers that we connect to." Motherboard interviews Gingerich and shows you how to use the network to avoid cell surveillance. According to Motherboard, all you need to do to join Sopranica is "create a free and anonymous Jabber ID, which is like an email address." Jabber is slang for a secure instant messaging protocol called XMPP that let's you communicate over voice and text from an anonymous phone number. "Next, you need to install a Jabber app on your phone," reports Motherboard. "You'll also need to install a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) app, which allows your phone to make calls and send texts over the internet instead of the regular cellular network." Lastly, you need to get your phone number, which you can do by navigating to Sopranica's JMP website. (JMP is the code, which was published by Gingerich in January, and "first part of Sopranica.") "These phone numbers are generated by Sopranica's Voice Over IP (VOIP) provider which provides talk and text services over the internet. Click whichever number you want to be your new number on the Sopranica network and enter your Jabber ID. A confirmation code should be sent to your phone and will appear in your Jabber app." As for how JMP protects against surveillance, Gingerich says, "If you're communicating with someone using your JMP number, your cell carrier doesn't actually know what your JMP number is because that's going over data and it's encrypted. So they don't know that that communication is happening."
Port your number to voip.ms, $1 per month will keep it running incase you need to re-verify. You can forward it anywhere you like as well or setup sip, text etc.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Soprani.ca is a collection of projects that aims to replace the entire cell phone network (its radio portions, its telephone network portions, etc.) with freedom-respecting alternatives - the title tries to encompass all of this, but perhaps that wasn't clear. To hopefully clarify a bit, here are the two main Soprani.ca projects right now:
JMP - A gateway to the phone network (including complete SMS support and MMS picture messaging) that you can use entirely over the Internet without involving any sort of cell carrier (and can thus use without anyone tracking your location). You can use JMP right now, and if you find wifi coverage is fine for you, you can ditch your cell carrier altogether and just use JMP for all your text/picture messaging and calling, leaving all the unwanted tracking behind.
WOM - A community-run radio network that lets you send text and picture messages over long distances (several or several dozen kilometres, depending on conditions). You can send your JMP messages over WOM if you like, which gives you cell network-like range, but without the cell network-like location tracking. We are still developing prototypes for WOM - if you'd like to know when WOM gateways (nodes connecting the WOM mesh to the Internet) are ready to deploy, please join the WOM Operatives list.