With reports that the witnesses in today’s murder by ICE were all detained (and their phones presumably confiscated), I’ve been thinking nonstop about if I were to record ICE or the cops doing something, how could I ensure that any videos I record are not able to be deleted, assuming my phone was confiscated? I’m talking about specific tactics.
My phone runs iOS. I already have a strong passcode which hopefully makes brute forcing difficult. I use ADP and the only thing I back up automatically are photos and videos. In theory, I think my setup is fairly secure, since it would be hard to get into my phone or my iCloud account. But I don’t know what vulnerabilities or tools I may be missing.
I’m asking for iOS, but I think it’s good to discuss Android and GrapheneOS as well.


Set up syncthing on your phone and whatever other device (laptop/pc/another phone at home/etc). Point it to your photos/videos folder and sync to your device at home(or friend’s house). If your phone is confiscated and they manage to get it deleted from the cloud, you’ll have a copy on your device. Make sure you enable settings like trashcan or versioning so the files deleted on your phone aren’t auto deleted on the device.
Also set it not to sync deletions
This. One-way sync to a home server/NAS or secure cloud storage that is not logged into on your phone (e.g. if you sync to NAS or a cloud service, don’t be logged in on other apps/web).
if your phone is taken while filming, it Won’t upload until it’s done recording. The agents will probably hit stop, then delete. you’d have to do some testing to see if that will stop the sync.
what?
I don’t think there will be a reliable work around for this. It will take a while to upload anyway.
If you’re one-way syncing your camera files to Dropbox for safe keeping, you don’t want to leave a way for them to access Dropbox.
chopping it up into short videos or livestreaming it could be a workaround.
set the fs watcher delay to something small in the advancdd folder settings in syncthing.
https://docs.syncthing.net/users/config?version=v1.29.6#config-option-folder.fswatcherdelays
It is my understanding that iOS does not support Syncthing.
Mayne that’s old? My quick google show Mobius Sync and Synctrain are two syncthing clients that work on ios.