After years of cybersecurity research, my conclusion is that in order to be "untraceable" you would have to jump through every single hoop the NSA setup to entrap you and spy on you. Y'see other countries like Germany and Canada have much better privacy protections than the US. In America, there are basically none. If anything, having some privacy would actually be illegal because it could be used by criminals. Let's dissect this into three layers:
1. Network-level
2. Hardware-level
3. Software-level
You would have to know all three in order to be safe. Let's start with networking. Cell phones are fundamentally unsafe. They all use baseband, which is proprietary, plus payment issues for network access (even if you had a supposedly "libre" Thinkpenguin Linux 4G modem this would still apply), and you can't hack into these networks without getting blackballed because of RF emissions. They got you cucked on the network level if you use cellular. Maybe VoIP, but the problem is that Wifi is proprietary too. You could use packet radio to access internet (even though it's slow), but the problem with that is radio tends to leak data unless you encrypt it (which is illegal even for HAM radio licensees) and of course this is heavily restricted. Your only option is using microwaves to access the internet. All you need is a 5 GHz or 24 GHz directional dish, a narrow beamwidth antenna, line-of-sight point-to-point link, a high-gain dish and low side-lobe radiation. Plus it's way faster and uou can legally encrypt it since microwave is less regulated than radio.
Secondly (and this is the hardest part, no pun intended) is the hardware. You can't have software like Linux without bare metal. Most people think that you can just go to the store and buy a Thinkpad, scrub the ME and that'll make you "untraceable" even when the display is proprietary, the hard drive is proprietary (which there's only one company on Earth that makes open source HDs and that's Raptor Computing Systems who use it for their Talos PCs, to which they cost tens of thousands of dollars, so don't even bother with them), plus you gotta take into account USB issues (the US used assembly scripted malware called STUXNET to target Iranian gas centrifuges that came from compromised USBs) as well as other things you would need to have locked down but can't because you don't have control over the hardware. The only way to go is homemade desktop SBCs (the SiFive HiFive Unmatched and Unleashed use DDR4 training which is proprietary, and don't even think of buying chips from fabs either because they all employ vendor firmwares of their own, even if it says "RISC-V" or "open source" and that includes VexRiscV chips). You would have to build all chips to solder yourself manually, which is possible but extremely time consuming. Jeri Ellsworth made her microprocessor for her Commodore 64 30-in-1 Direct-to-TV joystick remote computer using a toaster oven, a tea kettle, toilet bowl rust cleaner and tens of thousands of her own transistors (called "N-MOS" transistors) using silicon she bought off eBay. But even then, you can only make N-MOS transistors, not CMOS like modern CPUs use, and you could only work with making 1um or 500nm transistors because anything smaller (like 7nm) would require precision equipment at a trillion dollar fab. You don't have that kind of access unless you work at one or know somebody that does. Another problem is that modern smartphones use billions of transistors for a single board. So your finished device cannot even access the modern internet. You can use a terminal browser like lynx or w3m which are designed to be lightweight, but you would need light RISC-V with lightweight Linux (maybe uClinux). That or IRC. Email is possible if you're using SMTP.
1. Network-level
2. Hardware-level
3. Software-level
You would have to know all three in order to be safe. Let's start with networking. Cell phones are fundamentally unsafe. They all use baseband, which is proprietary, plus payment issues for network access (even if you had a supposedly "libre" Thinkpenguin Linux 4G modem this would still apply), and you can't hack into these networks without getting blackballed because of RF emissions. They got you cucked on the network level if you use cellular. Maybe VoIP, but the problem is that Wifi is proprietary too. You could use packet radio to access internet (even though it's slow), but the problem with that is radio tends to leak data unless you encrypt it (which is illegal even for HAM radio licensees) and of course this is heavily restricted. Your only option is using microwaves to access the internet. All you need is a 5 GHz or 24 GHz directional dish, a narrow beamwidth antenna, line-of-sight point-to-point link, a high-gain dish and low side-lobe radiation. Plus it's way faster and uou can legally encrypt it since microwave is less regulated than radio.
Secondly (and this is the hardest part, no pun intended) is the hardware. You can't have software like Linux without bare metal. Most people think that you can just go to the store and buy a Thinkpad, scrub the ME and that'll make you "untraceable" even when the display is proprietary, the hard drive is proprietary (which there's only one company on Earth that makes open source HDs and that's Raptor Computing Systems who use it for their Talos PCs, to which they cost tens of thousands of dollars, so don't even bother with them), plus you gotta take into account USB issues (the US used assembly scripted malware called STUXNET to target Iranian gas centrifuges that came from compromised USBs) as well as other things you would need to have locked down but can't because you don't have control over the hardware. The only way to go is homemade desktop SBCs (the SiFive HiFive Unmatched and Unleashed use DDR4 training which is proprietary, and don't even think of buying chips from fabs either because they all employ vendor firmwares of their own, even if it says "RISC-V" or "open source" and that includes VexRiscV chips). You would have to build all chips to solder yourself manually, which is possible but extremely time consuming. Jeri Ellsworth made her microprocessor for her Commodore 64 30-in-1 Direct-to-TV joystick remote computer using a toaster oven, a tea kettle, toilet bowl rust cleaner and tens of thousands of her own transistors (called "N-MOS" transistors) using silicon she bought off eBay. But even then, you can only make N-MOS transistors, not CMOS like modern CPUs use, and you could only work with making 1um or 500nm transistors because anything smaller (like 7nm) would require precision equipment at a trillion dollar fab. You don't have that kind of access unless you work at one or know somebody that does. Another problem is that modern smartphones use billions of transistors for a single board. So your finished device cannot even access the modern internet. You can use a terminal browser like lynx or w3m which are designed to be lightweight, but you would need light RISC-V with lightweight Linux (maybe uClinux). That or IRC. Email is possible if you're using SMTP.
