Phone Encryption - Open Whisper Systems

Someone on this board has said, over and over again, that in order to protect yourself from criminals you have to think like a criminal. The same goes for protecting your information. You have to think like the people who want to steal your information.

A quick search, via TOR, brought up this site:
Burner Phone Best Practices - B3RN3D

It brings up a number of really good points, not the least of which is that a burner is only a tool and a limited tool at that. Swapping your phone number does no good unless everyone you use it to connect with does the same thing at the same time. Correlation of all the data surrounding the usage of the phone can reveal a surprising, frightening amount of information. In corporate America we call it Business Analytics and/or Business Intelligence. It's the same concept that Google, Facebook, Amazon and all the other sites that drop cookies on your computer use to build a profile about you.

Your phone is only one link in the chains that are being drawn tight. Unplugging and declaring your independence from the surveillance state is a long, LONG process and require discipline that most people, myself included, can't really do for long or well.

For example, whenever I use this account I ONLY access the sites I connect to through TOR, period. This account and all of the information associated with it have only ever been online in an anonymized fashion. To the best of my knowledge there is nothing to link this account with my other "real" online identity. Yes, melbo knows I only use TOR for this account.

I do have a couple of burner phones and a plan to get them activated anonymously and make others aware of the number. I won't go into details now but maybe in a future post. I have no intention of using the phones for more than a couple of weeks before they are destroyed, utterly and completely, and replaced. That's just the tip of the iceberg in getting some of my privacy back though.