The Taliban’s curious love of SIM cards
restofworld.org
Afghanistan’s extremist rulers learned what all governments now know: SIM cards are worth every penny.

Ai generated TLDR:

The Taliban is distributing free SIM cards to Afghan refugees, likely to collect biometric data for tracking and surveillance purposes. SIM cards are valuable to governments for controlling communication networks and monitoring populations. Despite economic uncertainty, Afghanistan’s telecom industry has reported positive growth, with plans for building new towers. The Taliban’s regressive policies have barred women and girls from working, being educated, or visiting parks, and the value of tracking them is higher for the Taliban than the risk of giving them access to the world’s information. Internet shutdowns and government control over communication networks can cause economic and civilian harm, yet they are becoming increasingly common worldwide.

    • philpo@feddit.deEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      You are aware how fucking easy it is to link metadata from devices, no matter what connection they actually use once you have access to a countries backbone, especially if you are a low income country with just a few exchanges, a service that solely exists with centralised servers outside the country and no privacy laws? It’s extremely easy. Devices fingerprinting,etc. is a thing.

      The only benefit of Signal would be the fact that the man in the middle has no idea that you what you actually write. But considering that it’s easy for them to just claim someone has done something and punish them it’s no help here.

      There are designated messengers for situations like that, briar is one example. But Signal is a really bad choice here and Wifi doesn’t change a thing.