Baseband firmware/processors are still making strides in terms of defending against attacks so I don't think we are at the point where backdoors are needed. More likely that undocumented AT commands, plausibly deniable bugdoors and existing memory corruption vulnerabilities are already convenient reality. However, part of that reality is also that once the cellular modem is exploited OTA it is still a massive task to traverse IOMMU restrictions and get device owner data/secrets from the userspace OS. It doesn't even grant visibility into application traffic which has been aggressively TLS encrypted since the mid 2010s.

Obviously since phone calls and text messages are unencrypted the baseband chip could send them elsewhere. But your internet communication should already be encrypted before it hits the baseband chip. So is the threat model Motorola has intentionally introduced a backdoor to leak data from the main chip to the baseband chip?

Independence from the Chinese manufacturing hegemony probably means opting for a flagship Samsung, 11-series Pixel or pre-2025 Sony flagship.

That part is assumed, and the whole argument unravels once its established that the assumption doesn't hold. And then either the tankies show up, or everyone forgets about it until the next thread where the process plays out again.

I also think it's easy to underestimate your footprint when it comes to ecosystems that involve money in any capacity. No Amazon, Steam, no card information on a Netflix app, no signing in to Google to read a NYT article.

I think either you care about these things categorically or you don't, and I don't think anybody is going to be in the middle space you seem to be envisioning, which is concerned enough about the risks to avoid all banking but still a casual enough attitude about a compromised phone that you're fine with it for uses you consider non-secure.

At the same time, the state has its flaws and I'm questioning whether a top down system can ever really work, not out of some kind of "fuck the man" point of view, but more of an engineering and systems design perspective. If the system is perfectly factored, there are no cross-cutting concerns. But in such a system there is no need to communicate or coordinate laterally, only up and down. This sounds very lonely.

And if this system has a flaw, not a specific flaw, but rather a flaw in the assumption that tree structures with abstraction are a good way to organize systems, it might be impossible to change from let's say a tree with a single root to multiple interacting trees, with multiple roots of authority. Or maybe this is possible if people can learn to exist in multiple seemingly incompatible realities simultaneously?

Graphene being pwned is not mutually exclusive with authorities targeting individuals for using a phone marketed toward people who don’t want to be pwned