The way I see it, I don't have much direct control over the actualities of that kind of nation-state spying stuff. However:

1. I can direct my consumer-dollars towards the vendors that promise to respect ownership and privacy in general, and they will also have the most to lose if they are caught enabling spying.

2. Defense in depth. Security features generally add to the spying's difficulty, expense, or risk of detection, and that in turn decreases the incentive for abuse.

Ah nice so leave the phones in another room

Easy but for missing Step 1 of “Colocate with friends and business partners”

Israel has sold nuclear US state secrets to China. Don't hold your breath. https://www.military.com/defensetech/2013/12/24/report-israe...

true, they want it for themselves

This. I know some people who work for the former and they are always having to say "no, I don't work for that Motorola". The shared name is entirely historic.

I did. There's long term patent cross-licensing agreements between the two companies. Motorola mobility may be a separate company now, but they didn't start from scratch.

Actually Graphene has been shown to be resilient (uniquely) to some of the forensic tools used by governments.

defcon21 is from the pre-snowden world (2013), for anyone else wondering. Mobile landscape (our reliance on them, the central role they play in our lives) back then was a little bit different and indeed I'd not be surprised if most models support that the carrier can remotely read out any memory location or something

They already have it and it isn't part of what needs to be developed. Qualcomm does that for them.

Ya, I believe that's the correct answer. I believe there is an IOMMU or equivalent on modern phones to prevent those doubts binary blobs bring.

You're confusing Motorola Mobility with Motorola Solutions. These haven't been part of the same company since 2011. We would happily support devices from Motorola Solutions with their collaboration too but have no contact or partnership with them as they're an entirely different company. We want to support more devices meeting our requirements and if people have issues with one of the choices due to their opinions on geopolitics they can use another.

what exactly makes you feel good about a privacy black hole with the worlds foremost anti privacy captain at the helm ?

Those devices have atrocious security at a hardware, firmware and software level. Their microphone kill switch also doesn't prevent audio recording. They aren't open hardware despite many attempts to mislead people with the marketing.

> The latter even has most of the modem software freed.

Pinephones have entirely closed source baseband firmware. They use a highly unusual cellular radio which includes both an incredibly outdated Qualcomm baseband processor with atrocious updates and security combined with an extremely outdated proprietary fork of Android running on an extra CPU core which isn't present in any mainstream smartphone. It's only replacing the unusual extra OS which has been done. That whole component doesn't exist on other smartphones and the only reason it's possible to replace it is because the whole radio has absolutely atrocious security. The radio is connected via a far higher attack surface USB connection providing far less isolation for the OS and the USB connection can be used to flash the proprietary Android OS via the fastboot protocol. The baseband firmware itself doesn't have any replacement available.

Security theater, it has absolutely no use. If you can't trust your hardware that it won't actively listen to the microphone without your knowledge and permission then what are you even doing with that device?!

Sometimes you become a target purely by chance. You may witness something you should not have seen, are at the wrong place at the wrong time, the "algorithm" glitches and increases your "thread level" by 5000%. In most of these situations preparations like running graphene os can be quite the boon.

Or think of friends and family. When they become the target, you are prepared, you have the knowledge and tools ready, you can be the guide that helps them navigate a hostile digital world.

Whether parent is paranoid or not, Pegasus literally is used to spy, just because the state might not care about his hot nude pictures does not mean they don't care about other phone usage.

"While NSO Group markets Pegasus as a product for fighting crime and terrorism, governments around the world have routinely used the spyware to surveil journalists, lawyers, political dissidents, and human rights activists."[0]

Information these they can be much as powerful as a bomb, for example, I could learn more about your calls and discover that you do something immoral but not illegal and use it to blackmail you.

0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

I'm guessing you missed out on the Snowden revelations? Or the news articles about federal agents literally laughing at private dick pics.

And your second paragraph seems to go on the premise that the average person care if there is a backdoor.

I don't know why you wouldn't take security seriously, when even the US government is telling everyone to be careful where they supply their devices because of spying. Just don't trust them to point the finger the right way.

The UK government is known to spy on anti genocide protestors.

The US government is known to spy on anti ICE protestors.

If you have an opinion your government doesn't like, or a potential future government doesn't like, there's a good chance you have or will be spied on.

Perhaps you lack a single opinion worth caring about, but most people do not.

I'd say you aren't smart or are a shill.

> Nobody cares about you

This is such a low-iq argument I cannot even. Yes, nobody cares about OP, you, me, whatever - until they do. Not to mention general harvesting for profiling and propaganda reasons.

General: What do people in this city/country/region/etc are thinking - This is the main one where the data is used and collected, then grouped. It is extremely powerful information for targeted agenda whichever it might be.

Targeted: Oh, you or someone from your close ones went to a political protest? Too bad we have all this information to put you and your family in jail - This is where suddenly they will care about you, even when it is NOT YOU but someone from your close circles were the ones upsetting them.

And I'd say you don't understand how state-sponsored tracking and spying operates