All questions are in bold for ease of use.

The major carriers in the United States participate in NSA surveillance (except for T-Mobile apparently, because it’s based outside of the US. Except they bought Sprint, which participates.) and that, along with other major privacy issues, means that the market for private carriers is incredibly slim. When I found out that some carriers, such as Mint Mobile, piggyback off of Verizon, I wondered: What’s stopping a carrier from simply E2EE everything from Verizon, and then using Verizon to transfer the data? Obviously, the encrypted data could still be collected and sold, but it wouldn’t matter if the encryption was setup properly, right? I’m looking to better understand how this works, and, if a solution exists, potentially be the first to make it happen. The reason I’m not suggesting creating a carrier without piggybacking is due to the sheer cost and lack of support it would have, which would lead to poor adoption. Also, if carriers simply don’t support E2EE, couldn’t carrier locked phones install the software (since most install software anyways) required to make E2EE work?

  • impersonator@lemmy.ml
    2·
    9 months ago

    PSTN, I don’t know of any way to encrypt the call

    Many calls are VoIP nowadays though, which could be encrypted depending on your provider and upstream SIP trunks. It’s probably not end to end though, so your carrier can still spy on you.

    • voracitude@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 months ago

      Right. I was just thinking after I’d posted that over a traditional copper wire you could encrypt a voice call with an eletronic device that could encode your speech into audio, so it’d sound like a dial-up modem if you listened to it, and only another device with the decryption key could decode the audio back into speech, but there’d probably be some delay and I don’t even know if that’d be legal or allowed by the carrier’s TOS.