Probably? Transparent -- ITO on glass is the usual answer. You can deposit the ITO in patterns rather than as a continuous layer; and a conductive layer works as a faraday cage as long as the gaps are significantly smaller than the relevant wavelength (so ~mm for mmWave). So a ~500 µm grid could be laid down on glass in front of the screen, and conductively joined to a continuously conductive layer surrounding the back of the phone. The question, then, is whether the change in capacitance from a finger is observable by the touch screen through such a mesh... my intuition is that it would be, but would have to either model it or test it to find out. (Could test with just a stainless steel mesh from the hardware store.)

But none of this helps with the "toggle-able" part of the requirements…

No because your finger could operate as an antenna. You're conductive.

> chip bag Italian meta data incident

I’m not familiar with this one and search didn’t get me anything that seemed relevant. Got a link to something describing the incident?

What is the chip bag Italian meta data incident?

What is the infamous chip bag Italian meta data incident? I have had a quick search but nothing obvious jumped out. I'm very curious!

No; if a phone has both a non-removable battery and a baseband modem, then various laws require that modem to be wired directly to that battery (and to the phone's microphone) and to able to be activated in response to a legal wiretap order, even when the phone itself is nominally "powered off."

(And this doesn't even require that the phone stay connected to the network after the wiretap-enable packet is received. Rather, while the phone is "powered off", the baseband modem might sit there passively acting as a bug, capturing conversation through the microphone onto a bit of NAND onboard the modem; and then, once the phone is powered on again, the baseband modem will take the opportunity to silently play back whatever it's recorded to the tower.)

> if your use case is that sensitive even carrying a smartphone seems questionable.

The issue is that, if you're an actual honest-to-god spy (or investigative journalist...) trying to poke their nose into the goings-on of some government, then you want to draw as little suspicion to yourself as possible; and it's much more suspicious to be going around without the subject government's favorite citizen-surveillance tool on your person. In fact, to blend in, you need to be constantly using your state-surveillance-device to communicate with (decoy) friends and coworkers, doom-scroll, etc.

This is why spies are fans of the few remaining Android phone brands that offer designs with removable batteries. When meeting with a contact, they'll still slip their could-be-bugged-phone into a faraday bag, to cut off its network connectivity; but they'll also remove the phone's battery before putting the phone into the faraday bag, to inhibit this class of "powered-off" record-to-NAND-style baseband wiretap attacks.

(Of course, these are just ways to secure a phone you own + can determine wasn't subject to a supply-chain attack. If two people are meeting who aren't within the same security envelope, then either of them might be trying to surreptitiously record the conversation, and so their phones (or anything else on them) might contain a tiny bug with its own power source, that would stay active even if the macro-scale device's battery was removed. For such meetings, you therefore want to leave all electronic devices in a soundproof safe, in another room. Which will also implicitly act as a faraday cage.)

The iPhone antennagate story would suggest that sometimes this isn’t the situation.

Certainty?

In theory, an APT-type implant could keep transmitting even when airplane mode is engaged. This is what Faraday enclosures purportedly defeat.

Airplane mode doesn't turn off wifi or Bluetooth, though obviously you can do that in addition to airplane mode.

The difference between physical and software controls is pretty straightforward. (Closed source) software controls are just asking politely. Physical controls are making it so.

Airplane mode doesn't actually turn everything off, and it's not a guarantee like a faraday cage is. There are instances of devices still actually transmitting "stuff" in airplane mode, or having airplane mode silently disabled. A faraday cage is absolute, assuming correctly constructed, in that it guarantees zero signal can get in AND out. There's no ambiguity (again, assuming correct construction).

The question was hard for me to parse; I want to carry with me a snitch, but remove its ability to snitch, but be able to restore it's ability to snitch?

My approach is; how do avoid the snitch? I just leave my phone in the car or at home.

This just looks like a hard bag…wouldn’t you need to open it to use the device? I feel the goal of the suggestion was a way to hide the device while keeping it physically accessible.

For significantly less money, one could get these - https://www.amazon.com/Faraday-Anti-Tracking-Laptops-Firepro...

I keep backup navigation tablets on my sailboat inside of those, with the idea being that if the boat is ever neutralized by lightning, at least I'll have some backups. (I also have paper charts for most everywhere I might be.)

Can’t wait to hear from them: “I’d pay at least $5, maybe even $6 for this. I think you’re onto something critical for privacy.”

I came here to ask the same thing. Students in my district put their phones in Yondr pouches every day. No one removes the case.

So they don’t effectively block communication to and from the device? Or they don’t block all RF? Because the former seems to qualify as working, while the latter seems irrelevant. Or the only sometimes block communication to/from the device?

Way back in the flip phone days, I had evil tracking software on my corpo phone for a time.

I didn't mind that they knew where I was when I was being paid, but I had issues with abuse by one particular manager (who was more my equal than my boss, but nevermind that).

This tracking software could be disabled with a couple of button pushes, or the phone simply turned off, but these action generated alerts that were sent home to the mothership. I did not like this aspect at all.

So I bought a little Faraday bag from somewhere in China -- back then, probably from DealExtreme. It fit the phone so well that it seemed like it must have been made for that specific model (even though it almost certainly was not). Inside, it had two compartments: One that encapsulated the device well-enough with conductive fabric, and another that was outside of (and adjacent to) that envelope, which just protected the phone from things like incidental abrasions.

I used it as an every-day phone case. When I wanted the phone to work, I used the non-shielded part. If I wanted the phone to not work, then I used the shielded compartment instead.

In imprecise practical terms, this bag blocked successful RF communications. (And I knew this to be true, because I also had access to the mothership's web interface and could review the tracking data for myself and my coworkers.)

---

I can accept that "blocked" is not the most-precise term. In a way that is similar to many other things, a valid and accurate technical description of what was achieved would require additional precision.

But such precision is not always necessary in order to succinctly have words convey their desired intent, and I don't think it's required here for OP's intent to be understood.

I came here to say what you did. I used to work in three letter agencies and took part in testing faraday bags for clandestine operators. Something about faraday bags that most people don't know is that they have a shorter life than you would think. As they move around and bend, they start to "leak" more RF. WaitWaitWha is also correct that in a pinch, some aluminum foil works pretty well if you're careful. The service will be so bad, that the phone won't likely get packets out or in. Just be thorough when doing it.

Also, I worked with clandestine people and for most of them had threat models more relaxed than a lot of people on HN. What are you all up to???

That most likely wouldn't satisfy OP's requirement of not having to remove their case.

All phones have a removable battery. Modern phones just make it hard to use the phone again afterwards. :P

It says it's off. You're a journalist reporting against a fascist regime. You, your family, and known associates will be tortured and killed if you are found. Do you trust it, or a mesh wire lined bag that physics says definitely will block it?

I mean to be fair, there's really no guarantee that something in the phone's hardware is neither sending nor receiving (and processing) signals. I agree though that if you're worried about being tracked or attacked, in most scenarios you're better off just not having the phone on your person.

If you for some reason do need one, it's important to know when you put a modern iPhone in airplane mode it disables cellular but leaves WiFi/Bluetooth enabled. When you disable WiFi/Bluetooth it just disconnects from the devices for a day, but doesn't actually fully disable these fully. You can verify by going into the settings app and seeing that the radios are still toggled on.

And even if you do _that_, I have no idea how the software actually disables the hardware, but it may not physically power off the chip.

Everything is theater if one is cynical enough. One can very obviously find value in blocking the camera, even if other sensors remain active.

That said, I do see merit to flagging these. Related surprises are usually e.g. speakers being possible to use as microphones, and accelerometer data being possible to use for location tracking in lieu of GPS / any kind of radio, just not remotely & live ofc.

It's likely LLM generated

Reddit’s been fake for a while dude. They’re just taking top posts/comment chains and asking LLMs to generate similar content.