Téléphones portables

Dumbphone comme smartphone

Cellphone mass surveillance (Edward Snowden, VICE on HBO 2016)
- What kind of information can they get from my phone for example ?
Everything in your contact list, every SMS messages diffused, every place that ever been where your phone is physically located.
Even if you got the GPS disabled because they can see which wireless access points were near you. Every part of the private life today is found in someone's phone.
We used to say "a man's phone is his castle" ; today, a man's phone is his castle.
- My question to you is why don't more people care ? Because we've gone from cold war pre-911 to effectively a police state watching your every move an we went *shrug*. Why ?
Probably because it happens invisibly, if a politician had said "we want to watch everybody in the country" people would have open arms about it.
In the wake of September 11 the vice president of the United State Dick Cheney and his personal lawyer David Addington conspired with a number of top level officials in the NSA and others agencies to change not only what they considered to be the "legal restraints" but actually the culture of surveillance and intelligence community.
They moved from the exceptional surveillance to the surveillance of everyone.
Technology has changed; instead of sending people to follow you, we use the device you paid for. The services and the systems that surrounds you everyday to watch you on our behalf.
Metadata is the fact that the information occurred.
- So I called you
You called me, when you called me, where you called me from. This information is the same thing that is produced when a private investigator follows you around all day. They can't sit close enough to you in the caffé, but they can be close enough to know when you left your house, what the licence plate the car you're driving in, where you went, who you sat with, how long you were there, when you left, when you went after that.
That's metadata.
What is a mobile phone ? (Richard Stallman, Ulritch 2016)
So what is a mobile phone ?
It tracks a person's movement all the time, it's always sending signals saying "here I am, here is what you should [send] phones call or text messages" it has to do that in order for it to function, but the effect is that the phone company finds out always where it is and can localize it very precisely by triangulation from multiple towers. And it gets more accurate every year as they add more towers.
And with the back doors they can convert them into full time listening devices that hears all the conversations in the room even when it's not making any call, even when it's supposed to be switched off. You see, a mobile phone has no off switch, it only has a button saying "would you please be so kind as to switch off ?" but once it has been modified it is not so kind anymore, it doesn't switch off. You push the button and it pretends to switch off but it keeps running and transmitting, all the time.
I call this Stalin's dream.