>Old phones are an underappreciated resource, imo.
Not really. Old phones don't receive security patches and can be trivially unlocked to extract all relevant information. Sure, it might not have your nudes or bank login, but if you're using it to coordinate the protest that's plenty of incriminating evidence for the police.
>For alternate cell/SMS service I have a RedPocket SIM. (note: I see now it's $45/yr on ebay.
You have to be very careful with this, otherwise it's trivial to tie the phone/SIM back to you. Off the top of my head:
* the billing/shipping address used to order the SIM
* any payment information used to top-up the account
* location correlations with any other devices you own (for instance, if your burner phone pings the same towers as your primary phone for an extended period of time)
* using it for anything other than protests (eg. as a "burner" number when applying for jobs to avoid spam)
It depends on the threat model. A local police force vacuuming up cell data looking for easy targets and ways to intimidate protestors is different than a targeted investigation by a state actor to identify everyone at all costs.
The Jan 6 insurrection is a good example of how difficult it is in a real world scenario to ID specific people in a large protest, and many of them got caught because they talked about it afterward on Facebook. If you are cell phone 2,347 on a spreadsheet of 33,422 phones and the number has no associated locational data, open source information, etc. you are way safer than bringing your regular phone, while not being an easy target and being able to communicate if you need to.
Not really. Old phones don't receive security patches and can be trivially unlocked to extract all relevant information. Sure, it might not have your nudes or bank login, but if you're using it to coordinate the protest that's plenty of incriminating evidence for the police.
>For alternate cell/SMS service I have a RedPocket SIM. (note: I see now it's $45/yr on ebay.
You have to be very careful with this, otherwise it's trivial to tie the phone/SIM back to you. Off the top of my head:
* the billing/shipping address used to order the SIM
* any payment information used to top-up the account
* location correlations with any other devices you own (for instance, if your burner phone pings the same towers as your primary phone for an extended period of time)
* using it for anything other than protests (eg. as a "burner" number when applying for jobs to avoid spam)