Burner Phone Best Practices
by B3RN3D, published January 22 2014

"There's a good mix of useful and mis-information in regards to burner phones out there. I thought I would compile some facts and review the proper use-case for a burner phone.

Tracking: Fingerprinting

Burner phones, for both CDMA and GSM, are easy to trace. Carriers specifically segregate burner/prepaid traffic from normal subscriber traffic. Yes, this is primarily used to control which type of traffic should receive priority, but it's used by LEOs to easily identify network traffic used by targets.

Bruce Schneier recently commented on what the NSA is actively doing in regards to burner phones. In a recent lawsuit between the NSA and the EFF, [...]one of the ways the US keeps track of burner traffic, is by fingerprinting the number of unique contacts, and the times of the calls. With this information, it's much easier to keep track of whose phone is whose[...]"

Source: Radical Defense (link)

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