Investigators are now asking if this is in line with what happened in the White House on January 6, 2021. The Washington Post and CBS News reported Tuesday that a House inquiry found a seven-hour, 37-minute gap in Donald Trump’s official call logs. on that day, on which hundreds of his supporters unleashed a deadly outburst on the US Capitol. Trump has invoked ignorance, claiming in a statement in stores: “I have no idea what a burning phone is, as far as I know I have never even heard the term.” But former President John Bolton’s former national security adviser has disputed this, saying Trump has used the phrase many times in discussions about how to avoid caller control. Either way, it’s important for all of us – including the president – to understand what a burner phone is and what it does. A burning phone is a simple idea: a disposable phone, usually purchased prepaid and without a contract, which one buys to make calls or send messages shortly before the phone “burns”. Who uses them? In the popular imagination, cell phones are associated with crime. As Detective Carlton Lassiter put it in the American comedy series Psych: “The only people who use them are low-life criminals, such as drug dealers, terrorists and people of lower faith.” Breaking Bad’s anti-hero baron, Walter White, often uses cheap cell phones to make calls before he cuts them in half. And on The Wire, Bernard, a drug lover, visits convenience stores to buy prepaid phones for the rest of his organization. But cell phones are also used by activists protesting police brutality, Hong Kong trying to circumvent Covid rules, cheating on spouses, teenagers defying their parents and tourists avoiding roaming charges abroad. In short, we live in an age where cell phones are so cheap and easy on the market that anyone can use burners. Jake Moore, a cybersecurity expert and former police forensic expert in the United Kingdom, told the Guardian that cell phones could be “very difficult” to detect by law enforcement. Keeping a phone “clean” starts with keeping it offline. Experienced users never bring their burner phone and main phones with them at the same time. “Your phone is a surveillance device,” said the security expert. “If you’re driving a burning phone and still have your other phone with you, then law enforcement can make a trifle about where you were.” John Bolton says that Donald Trump mentioned burning phones in discussions about avoiding control. Photo: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images A burner phone can also be detected by the people it communicates with. “If a burning phone is talking and communicating with another phone, that other phone will have call records connecting the two,” Moore said. To maximize privacy, the people you interact with should also use burnout phones. According to the former police officer, the most important principle of the telephone burner is to discard it and replace it constantly. But not everyone remembers doing that. When he was a police officer, “we often found a ton of these phones burning on a property,” he said. While taking a flip phone looks good on TV, properly “burning” a phone requires destroying the sim card, Moore said. Some people take more dangerous steps, including microwave phones. There are some software alternatives for recording phones: the Burner smartphone app creates new phone numbers for users, and Signal is an example of a heavily encrypted messaging app. But while using these applications, “your phone is still transmitting a lot of data, especially location,” Moore said. “So it’s not a complete way of doing things.” So if someone was using a burner phone to orchestrate a White House coup, could law enforcement triangle the user? While it may be technically possible, the biggest obstacles may be legal. “You have to have a warrant to get this information about that person, which is not easy to do from the point of view of the threat actor, because they have to prove why they need it through the courts. the telecommunications provider to obtain this information. ” For the user, the biggest hurdle for burning phones is that it is a huge inconvenience. Early in his term, Trump rejected a more secure phone, preferring to stick to his favorite old Android phone. It would not necessarily be easy for the US president to keep switching on burning phones. “You’re starting to kill convenience,” Moore said. “You have to tell your nearest and dearest the new number every time. But how can you trust it? “If I get a message from Donald Trump saying that this is Donald Trump’s new phone number, I will suspect it is not.”
