Digital Security for Arrestable Actions

For lower-risk arrestable actions, it's best to have everyone either A) leave their phone at home or B) turn off their phones and leave them with a support person. This is often a person doing jail supportJail SupportA support role during an arrestable action or protest. These people support arrestees during and after an action. They track who's been arrested, stay in touch with lawyers, wait outside the jail, and bring people their phones, food, and a ride home once they're released.. This person should either not attend the action or be in a very low-risk position on the far edges of the action.

Tip: If there are a lot of phones and you need to confirm each person is the true owner of the phone they point to in the stack, you can ask them to unlock the phone in your presence.

Check out our Signal Checklist for detailed instructions on configuring Signal to be as secure as possible.

The best upgrade everyone can make to their use of Signal is to make sure that disappearing messages are enabled by default. Most activists we talk to haven't enabled this by default. (And most people forget to enable it manually for each new thread.)

This keeps you safe and other people safe. We don't know who's phone will be seized by law enforcement. Even if we believe we're talking about perfectly legal things, the government can find ways to twist our words to attempt to make a case against us for our dissent

There are two things to track related to disappearing messages:

1. First, change your default so any thread you make has this feature enabled.
2. Second, make sure it is enabled for threads that other people start: if someone else starts the thread, it may not have disappearing messages enabled. You may need to enable it.

Choosing your disappearing message time: How long you set your disappearing times depends on the sensitivity of your messages. A question you might ask yourself is "if someone's device was confiscated or hacked, how important is it that these messages are not accessible?"

• For chatting about low-risk things with friends, you might choose 4 weeks.
• For standard political organizing, you might choose 1 week.
• For a higer-risk actions, you might set it to 1 day or 1 hour or 5 minutes, so the messages are gone before the action starts.

Google tracks all user activity - including what documents you open, share, and access. Law enforcement can obtain this data through subpoenas/warrantsWarrant vs. SubpoenaBoth are legal orders that can force a company to hand over your data. A warrant must be signed by a judge who agrees there's probable cause of a crime, and it can also let police search your home or phone. Many subpoenas need no judge at all, but they don't give the investigator access to as much information. ICE often uses "administrative warrants" signed by an ICE officer, not a judge. These don't give them the right to enter your home without your permission., and they've been known to share it without proper authorization. Doing our organizing outside of Google Docs helps us keep each other more safe.

Proton Docs is a high-quality alternative to Google Docs. Your docs are end-to-end encrypted, which means that even if the authorities accessed Proton's servers, they wouldn't be able to see what was contained in your documents.

Encourage the people you're organizing with to get a Proton account and you can all move toward being more secure.

Looking for forms? Proton doesn't have a solution like Google Forms. You can try Cryptpad forms or Jotform with the end-to-end encrypted option enabled.

We are in an era where the federal government is surveilling and prosecuting activists with a level of intensity we haven't seen in decades.

When doing mass organizing, we're always balancing the need for security with the need to grow our movements and build power.

One way we can reduce unnecessary risk is to be careful about what we write down. What we write down often ends up being used against us in court, even if we're using encryptedEncryptionScrambling information so that only someone with the right key, like your password or passcode, can read it. To anyone else, encrypted data looks like random, unreadable text.Learn more: EFF Surveillance Self-Defense tools like Signal.

For any organizing involving risking arrest (or highly targeted organizing like ICE watch or Palestine solidarity), it's important to have agreements about what folks will not write down.

How the data ends up in court:

• Someone's phone is seized. If anyone in a chat is arrested and police get into their phone, they can read every message and document on it.
• A company hands over your account. Services like Google Docs aren't end-to-end encrypted, so the company can see your documents and give them to police who get a subpoena or warrantWarrant vs. SubpoenaBoth are legal orders that can force a company to hand over your data. A warrant must be signed by a judge who agrees there's probable cause of a crime, and it can also let police search your home or phone. Many subpoenas need no judge at all, but they don't give the investigator access to as much information. ICE often uses "administrative warrants" signed by an ICE officer, not a judge. These don't give them the right to enter your home without your permission.. In 2025, Google gave ICE a graduate student's account information in response to a subpoena, without telling the student first.
• Someone in the group is an informant or undercover cop. In the 2026 federal case against the Minnesota 15, undercover agents joined activists' Signal group chats and passed along what they read, which prosecutors then used in court.

This is the number you will call if you’re arrested that can support you from the outside. This is relevant for higher risk situations.

Every time a new operating system update comes out, it is fixing security holes. Each update you haven't installed represents a longer list of ways the cops can hack into your device. Think of it as a big building with more and more doors left unlocked.

If your operating system is not up-to-date, many of the other recommendations in this guide will not protect your data.

Start with your phone. If you're doing something higher risk, make sure to update all your devices.

How long does it take to crack a passcode?

Note: These times only apply to phones. Computers can be cracked much more quickly, and need much stronger passwords.

Sources: The estimates in the table above assume real-world observed attempts/second from police forensic hacking tools. If you need more security, use a 10-digit passcode, which will protect you even under the highest-possible cracking scenarios. See the sources linked in the passcode FAQ here.

Caveat: Face and fingerprint unlock let you use stronger passwords without typing them all the time. If you have to choose, it's better to have a longer passcode than to turn off face/fingerprint unlock. If you leave biometrics on, make sure you know how to quickly turn them off if you're heading into a high-risk situation (see tips below).

If your phone is confiscated by law enforcement, one of the biggest risks is exposing your entire network. Even if people aren't using their real name on their Signal account, there is still a unique ID behind every Signal username. And the cops can use this to correlate someone's identity across many seized devices.

You need to both leave AND delete the group:

• If you only leave the group, old messages stay on your phone as well as the history of who was in the group.
• If you only delete the group, new messages will still come through and the thread re-appears.

Security hygiene tips:

• Set a recurring reminder to clean up your Signal thread every 3 months.
• Make sure you take note of which groups you are leaving and who you can ask to re-add you after the action.

Note: If you find this process very annoying and cumbersome (because it is!), that's another good reason to use a secondary phone for actions. That phone would only ever be in the one or two groups needed to pull off the action that day.

When your phone is fully powered off, it's more secure against data extractionPhone-Cracking Tools (forensic extraction tools)Devices that cops and border agents use to break into seized phones and copy the data off them, sometimes including deleted messages. Cellebrite and GrayKey are the best-known brands. A long random passcode and an up-to-date phone make them much less effective.Learn more: EFF Street Level Surveillance by the cops. The data is encrypted until after you enter your passcode for the first time.

Therefore, the number one thing you can do to protect your data is turn your phone off as soon as you think your risk of arrest is going up.

Trade-offs: We recognize there are trade-offs in turning off your phone. Sometimes it is more important to film the police or coordinate with our allies. Think through what is the priority for you. If you need to film, consider bringing a secondary phone so you have less sensitive data on it.

Not having your phone on you when you are detained is the best way to protect your data and the movement. Powering it fully off is the second best approach.

Once the action is over, the documents and chats you made are no longer needed. The longer they stick around, the more chances that they can end up in the hands of the cops through a seized phone, a subpoenaWarrant vs. SubpoenaBoth are legal orders that can force a company to hand over your data. A warrant must be signed by a judge who agrees there's probable cause of a crime, and it can also let police search your home or phone. Many subpoenas need no judge at all, but they don't give the investigator access to as much information. ICE often uses "administrative warrants" signed by an ICE officer, not a judge. These don't give them the right to enter your home without your permission., or an informant in the group.

Before the action, agree on a cleanup plan. Create an accountability system to help you follow through.