Taking Your Phone To A Trump Protest Could Have Alarming Consequences

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.”

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.

Although not bringing a phone at all makes it harder for surveillance, “realistically, most of us want to have some form of communication and find it difficult to leave a phone behind,” Ruizesparza said. In these cases, privacy experts strongly recommend disabling biometrics like fingerprint recognition and Face ID if you bring your phone to a protest.

That’s because, in general, a memorized passcode has stronger legal protections against a court order compelling you to unlock or decrypt your phone. But when you enable biometrics logins, you may compromise your Fifth Amendment privilege against being compelled to incriminate yourself.

“As a practical matter, the protection is better too,” added Budington. “Because if you are in a situation where you’re detained, then regardless of a situation legally, a officer might be able to unlock your device without your consent just by taking your fingerprint and pressing it against the touch ID or showing it to your face.”

Disabling biometrics can vary by device, but for Android 12 and later devices, you can enable Lockdown mode to temporarily disable fingerprint and facial recognition. For iPhones, you can go to Settings, find “Face ID & Passcode” and turn “iPhone Unlock” off.

“We really encourage people to disable those [biometrics] and instead to use a strong numeric or alphanumeric password to unlock your phone, to ensure that no one can unlock your phone without your consent,” Joshi said.

As for tracking concerns, airplane mode is “pretty good,” and can mitigate dangers of having your real-time location tracked by ads, Budington said.

You can also buy additional tech to help you block your location signal, but there are pros and cons. Faraday bags can help block signals “a little bit more than airplane mode,” Budington said, especially if you forget to turn off certain settings. But he cautioned that by bringing one, “you will reduce your ability to plausibly deny that you’re part of the protest.“

These are basic phone security considerations, but there are longer primers that can help you strategize how to secure your phone before and after protests. For example, “if you take pictures at protests, you should take some extra time to blur out faces and possibly remove metadata. Signal actually has a blurring feature built in,” Ruizesparza noted.

Above all, don’t wing it. Creating a gameplan before a protest takes time and sometimes difficult conversations but “ultimately, secure practices don’t just keep the individual safe, but also keep the collective network around the individual secure as well,” Ruizesparza said. “Practical safety and security is a simple act of solidarity.”

And it gives you and your friends the reassurance that if “it hits the fan, there’s something we can do,” Ruizesparza said.

So before you ask the question of whether or not you should bring your phone, ask, “Am I going with someone? And will people know what to do if
something happens?” Ruizesparza said.

Take it from Sabatine. Right now, they are planning to be the only one in their protest group who will have a burner phone, so that their friends can go phone-less. Beyond writing phone numbers of each other and of lawyers on their arms, Sabatine is also telling their parents and friends about their location for the protest, so someone knows where they will be.

If it wasn’t for the increased military presence in Los Angeles, “I don’t know if I would have gone the extra mile for security or safety,” Sabatine said. “But because the forces are now different, I think that’s what’s making people pivot their action plans a little bit more and erring on the side of safety.”