[liberationtech] SMS questions

[elijah]

On 08/27/2013 09:36 AM, Richard Brooks wrote:

> I have colleagues living in a small country, far, far
> away with a history of rigged elections who want to
> put in place a system for collecting information
> using SMS. The local government keeps shutting
> down the systems that they put in place.

As you probably know, the main solutions people use for this are
Ushahidi or FrontlineSMS, but neither of these are secure enough for
your needs, I think.

FrontlineSMS has a good rundown of risks here:

http://www.frontlinesms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/frontlinesms_userguide.pdf

Guardian created a fork of the Ushahidi android app to support encrypted
transport, but it requires a data plan (and maybe isn't maintained?):

https://guardianproject.info/2010/03/10/ushahidi-linda-testimony-protection/

If you want secure reporting over SMS as the transport, I think your
only option is moxie's TextSecure android app. This will not help in
processing the reports, but it will allow the reports to be securely
submitted. The government will still be able to identify and shut down
this approach by identifying which devices are sending encrypted SMS
messages or by blocking the number that reports are submitted to.

The final option is to use SMS over satellite phones. Supposedly, this
works very well, but is monstrously expensive.

-elijah