🛑 "Put it in a Faraday bag." — That advice no longer holds for some of us.
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: I'm publishing a 36-page personal forensic testimony today. Not as a researcher. Not as an institution. As the person this was done to. I went looking for someone I care about. In return, my devices were instrumented, my firmware was intercepted, my Faraday bag was defeated, and my body was exposed to RF 2.5–10× the regulatory limit. What I documented: 📱 A sealed Disklabs bag (rated ≥80 dB, confirmed working for clean devices) fails to silence my Samsung Tab S9 Ultra — Wi-Fi still visible at -79 to -87 dBm through the sealed bag. 📹 Video evidence of an active download progressing through the sealed bag. TCP requires bidirectional ACKs — there's no way to sustain that through a sealed bag without the device actively transmitting. 🍎 Cross-platform: my Apple iPhone maintains a live Wi-Fi association through the same sealed bag. Same family of Tx Power Admin components on both. Two operating systems, two chipset vendors — not a Samsung quirk. 🔬 9,322-line forensic extraction shows the complete Qualcomm Tx Power Admin stack plus Samsung's SemWifiBackOff regulatory backoff framework — 54+ named components that shouldn't exist on a consumer device. ⚠️ The SAR backoff bypass means I'm being exposed to RF 2.5–10× the FCC/ICNIRP limit, every second the device is held against the body. I deliberately opted out of 5G. That setting has been disconnected from the underlying HAL. The "off switch" is decorative. The math: a single 80 dB bag can't silence a device transmitting at +25–30 dBm. High-value targets need three nested bags (~240 dB). What this is: a personal testimony backed by video evidence, controlled tests, and a reproducible methodology. What this isn't: a spectrum analyser measurement. I'm explicitly inviting anyone with that equipment to reproduce the test. Every institution I've contacted has declined to engage. So I'm publishing directly. #Faraday #Surveillance #MobileSecurity #JournalistSecurity #OpSec #Privacy #SAR #5G #RFExposure #WhistleblowerProtection #DigitalRights #CivilSociety #SecurityResearch #Forensics
Author: Khan, Kamran
Language: English
Topic: Digital and Cyber Forensics
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225818212
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