I think I mentioned this before, but was in Washington DC for tourism and my cellphone kept getting incoming calls while in the DC area. Stopped as soon as we left. Don't know for sure, but suspect various agencies, foreign and domestic, intercept cellphone traffic. Not sure why they called the number. But it was pretty unusual. I only rarely get unknown callers otherwise.
I think the basic message from the article is that is just a false belief.
I do agree that generally LE has very little interest in going after people engaging in consensual P4P. I also think that in most cases where people get exposed it's got nothing to do with their phone. The burner phone produced zero protection. However, in the case of LE there has been a pretty obvious pattern of trickle-down of such capabilities much as has been seen with military equipment going to State and Local police forces as a cost offsetting measure -- often to the detriment of those living or transiting the local area.
I know you are not ignorant or unable to consider trajectories of technology related to big data, ML and AI and general system security gaps. But the article seems to suggest that these functions are really more covert back doors than some type of software hacks or simple security flaws/poor coding from a security perspective.
But who are you making yourself anonymous for? I don't think it is the government based on how easily it can control your phone and all the other resources that could be brought to bear should you become of interest. Anonymous for the agency? They have fairly low tech ways of finding our who you are, what you drive, where you live, where you work, if you have a wife or kids.... All they need for that are a couple of people with time on their hand to follow you around and perhaps take some pictures. I don't think they care enough to do that but if they did, like with the government that burner phone is doing pretty much nothing.
I suspect most people are more worried about family, SO/wife and the like. But how many guys with burner phones or their hidden phone and hobby emails and accounts have gotten caught? I think it would be interesting to know if the frequency there is pretty much the same for, for lack of a better name, the burner population and the non-burner population. While I have no idea what the reality there is, I do know that people that seem nervous generally attract more attention to themselves. Given that, I would not really be surprised to find out there was a higher frequency of guys in the burner population getting caught than in the other population. But that's just speculation. The point of the post was just to make some a bit more aware of what they are really up against so they can just give some though to whether of not the extra effort was actually getting them what they thought.
