Taking Your Phone To A Trump Protest Could Have Alarming Consequences

“Even if it’s in airplane mode, there’s a chance that your movements can be tracked," one privacy expert said.

This weekend, Hina Sabatine will protest President Donald Trump’s administration in Los Angeles and they won’t bring their usual phone.

“We’re protesting the administration, which is a lot scarier [than previous protests I’ve attended], because we’ve seen how Trump can lash out,” Sabatine said. For this upcoming protest, “I’m bringing a burner phone which doesn’t have my Touch ID or my face scan.“Sabatine is one of many who are rallying against Trump at thousands of expected “No Kings” protests scheduled across the nation this weekend to reject authoritarianism and to counter Trump’s military birthday parade celebration Saturday, according to the movement’s website. These marches follow ongoing protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids targeting immigrants.Sabatine, who has marched for a free Palestine and Black Lives Matter over the last decade, said they are now adding additional layers of phone security in response to Trump deploying the National Guard to Southern California. In addition to using an old Android phone with just a memory card for taking videos, Sabatine will also be putting that phone in a special pouch, known as a Faraday bag, that can block cell and Wi-Fi signals. “Given that I am an immigrant, I’m just going to just do all the extra steps,” they said. Should you do the same? Many of us rely on our phones to travel and find our friends in crowds, but they can also reveal more about us than we would want ― especially to authorities. That’s why one of the big questions you need to ask yourself is whether you should bring your phone to a protest. “We get this question a lot, and I think it really depends,” said Anu Joshi, an American Civil Liberties Union’s staffer who has led multiple “Know Your Rights” trainings for the “No Kings” marches. “What we encourage people to do is just to consider the potential risks.”

The Case For Not Bringing A Phone At All

Your phone can track your real-time location, and you might not want federal authorities or law enforcement to be able to look up that you were at a protest through a potential subpoena.“Even if it’s in airplane mode, there’s a chance that your movements can be tracked,” Joshi said. “The only way to ensure that you aren’t being tracked through your phone is not bringing it at all.“That’s because “when you move, your phone is connecting to various cell phone towers. The most surefire way of preventing that from happening is turning your phone off,” said Alejandro Ruizesparza, one of the co-directors at Lucy Parsons Labs, a Chicago-based group of technologists and activists that runs digital security training classes.Ruizesparza said when they protest, they turn their phone off before they even leave their home, so it’s less easy for cellular data to help determine where they were going that day. The other downside to bringing your phone is if it gets confiscated by officers, the data within it may get used against you. “If you are detained or arrested, then your phone could be taken from you. And law enforcement has wide use of a number of forensic extraction devices,” said Bill Budington, an Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff technologist.Forensic extraction devices can reveal private information, such as whether you attended a protest, your communications with sources and social media posts on sensitive topics, for example. “And so those devices, especially if they’re being used on an older device or a device that hasn’t had operating system security updates in a while, will be able to more readily extract all sorts of information,” Budington said. If you don’t want to leave your phone at home, you can leave it in your car, so that it “becomes harder to pinpoint your whereabouts at any point,” Joshi suggested. Or leave it off during the protest. “This should ideally prevent some level of tracking and the creation of data linking you to these protests,” Ruizesparza said.

If you do bring a phone, at least turn off Touch ID and Face ID.