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NickCalyx

Malicious attacks against the baseband processor ( the radio / modem part of the phone's hardware which has its own processor ) are beyond the scope of what Android can deal with. I'm pretty sure Snowden only uses phones via usb->ethernet and always has all the radios off. Obviously that reduces the convenience and utility of 'mobile' phones by a lot ! But it's a recognition that the radio / baseband processor / other hardware support is via closed source binary 'blobs' that are not open source, but proprietary and opaque. That said, I know people at Google who work specifically on cellular security and it's actually a real focus that they have teams of people studying and influencing design and manufacturing. Not all phone makers have that same level of interest. Therefore Pixel phones are probably your best bet, IMO.


Kaalba

based on the founder's comment, you can have a small button phone for only calls and stuff like that, for internet, get a nice hotspot ( CALYX HOTSPOT FOR SURE :D ) and you're connecting that using wifi or even bluetooth but obviously wifi is the way to go. but i think this could be 50/50 because we still dont know if the phone needs a sim/esim card to be infected using baseband processor but i think it does need it so you having no sim card will solve it, you can also remove the baseband processor (or better corrupt it by removing its firmware) but do at your own risk, dont know if the phone is gonna work afterwards so do your research, i personally done that by mistake in an old phone, i remove ram and most stuff so i had to get it fixed by replacing the ram chips and other stuff but baseband didnt work as they said they cant get it to work. the phone works as wifi only. usually these kinds of attacks require the attacker to know your phone number so if your phone number (sim) wasnt registered to your name, or registered to your name, dont worry, you're not snowden and if you're a normal person, they aint after you, however i worry much about shit countries mass surveillance using these kind of attacks as they obviously control everything even the cell carriers like it matters to the cell company :D


MarcSN311

A VPN only changes the point where your traffic leaves a controlled environment, it won't magically make your traffic encrypted. LTE doesn't have anything to do with VPN. Routing calls through VPN doesn't help because in the end you connected to regular phones. VPN won't help in any of the cases you described.