Covert wireless (was: A crowdfunding campaign to build a free baseband)

[wirelesswarrior at Safe-mail.net]

"The device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls. Let’s stop calling them phones. They are trackers."

https://www.propublica.org/article/thats-no-phone.-thats-my-tracker


SF,

Most mobile phone users (like most citizens) are more than willing to sacrifice their privacy for convenience, socializing and entertainment. Educating them and changing their behaviours will, in the long run, probably bring the most benefits. Cypherpunks have been rather poor at this. A sucessful multiplayer game, requiring the use of criminal/spy/intel tradecraft and security tools, would be a great first step. Once these players integrate these tools and skills into their daily lives and pressure friends and family to do likewise it could prove insideous to law enforcement and intel agency privacy violations and turn the tide.

Having a fully open mobile phone is good first step which can improve privacy when used with existing mobile networks but its only a first step. Alternative networks (e.g., WiFi mesh and open femtocell networks) are an obvious direction for improvement but their build out is problematic. Another way is to enable alternative communications that either need no infrastructure (think amateur radio) or covertly utilize existing commercial services (I mentioned pagers in my last post). The mobile phones would offer excellent user interfaces and processing the element of an affordable and flexible software radio transceiver.

I delivered a paper last October regarding the reasons such alternatives are needed, reviewed recent developments and offered some practical directions for future work (some of which I am pursuing):

http://www.paralelnipolis.cz/pp-congress-2014/WWPP.pdf


Feedback from you and readers of this list is kindly sought.

WW


-------- Original Message --------
From: falcon at ivan.Harhan.ORG (Spacefalcon the Outlaw)
To: wirelesswarrior at Safe-mail.net
Cc: cypherpunks at cpunks.org, Blibbet <blibbet at gmail.com>
Subject: re: A crowdfunding campaign to build a free baseband
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2015 06:56:09 GMT

> Hi WW,
> 
> > Although creating an open GSM mobile modem is an interesting technical
> > exercise [...]
> 
> I take offense at the way you trivialize it.  It is not just "an
> interesting technical exercise", but a way to dramatically improve the
> quality of life for cellphone users.
> 
> Yes, I realize that it is possible to live without cellphones.  I lived
> without them for the first 20-odd years of my life, so I know it's
> possible.  But like many others, I am now addicted to the ability to
> call my significant other or receive calls from her no matter where I
> am.
> 
> Yes, it's an addiction, and arguably an unhealthy one, just like drugs.
> In that light my project may be seen as a harm reduction measure.  If,
> for example, a person is addicted to injectable heroin and won't quit
> no matter what, it would be better to have that person receive his/her
> heroin injections in a safe medical setting than to buy junk on the
> street and inject it with dirty needles.  It's called harm reduction.
> 
> By the same logic, if a person is addicted to the always-on reachability
> provided by traditional cellular networks and won't give it up no
> matter what, it would be much better if s/he can connect to these
> cellular networks using free software (in the FSF definition) than the
> utterly proprietary kind that all commercial handsets ship with.
> 
> In my own case, I am a cellphone addict, and my quality of life is
> currently very negatively impacted by the proprietary software running
> on my cellular phone handset.  The rest of life is completely free
> from proprietary software: no Windows, no MacOS, I run Slackware on my
> x86 devices and I also greatly enjoy my 1980s VAX minicomputers running
> my own version of BSD UNIX.  My home Internet connection is served by
> a modem which I designed and built myself - Open Source Hardware, of
> course.  But the moment I would like to pick up the phone to call my
> dear significant other and tell her how much I love her, I have to use
> a device that runs proprietary firmware.  This situation causes me an
> enormous amount of distress.
> 
> I seek to improve my quality of life by freeing it (my life) from
> proprietary software.  The cellphone in my purse (I'm M2F transgender)
> is the last frontier.  The handset hardware (it's a Pirelli DP-L10) is
> absolutely perfect for my needs, but the proprietary firmware ruins it.
> I need to replace this proprietary firmware with one which I compile
> from source myself and which I can improve as my needs evolve.
> 
> I hope that I am not the only cellphone addict whose quality of life
> can be improved by replacing proprietary firmware in the handset with
> free software.  When it comes to freeing my own life from proprietary
> software, I can do it on my own without any crowdfunding.  I already
> have an Openmoko phone and about 15 Pirellis, so I have everything I
> need.  But I very much hope that the number of people who can benefit
> from my work is greater than 15, and if it is, then my available stash
> of Pirellis won't be enough.
> 
> If there are more than 15 people in the world whose quality of life
> can be improved by replacing their handset proprietary fw with free
> sw, then we need to build our own hardware to solve the problem of the
> pre-existing old models being in too short supply.  This hardware work
> is what costs money, hence the crowdfunding campaign.
> 
> Thus regardless of whether my crowdfunding campaign succeeds or not, I
> *will* have a phone in my purse running 100% free firmware.  But if
> anyone else would also like to have such a phone, we need the
> crowdfunding campaign to succeed so we can build more phones than the
> 15 or so Pirellis in my stash.  The matter is now in your hands, where
> "you" refers to the community at large.
> 
> > PS: Suggest you enable lower contribution steps for crowd funding. They are
> > too high for many who might like to help but cannot afford or justify the
> > current steps.
> 
> There are no "steps"; one can donate as little as $1.  Those who donate
> $100 or more can opt to receive a "perk" (Indiegogo term) as a reward
> for his/her donation.
> 
> I am not able to offer perks for donations below $100 as the cost of
> fulfilling those perks would eat up the money and there would be little
> if anything left for the actual project, defeating the purpose.
> 
> SF