Reporting Elections, Safety and Security of Journalists 1. 2. 3. 4. Never let people whom you don’t trust get physical access to your phone; this is a common way of installing spying software on your phone. If you are conducting private and important meetings, switch your phone off and disconnect the battery. Or don’t carry the phone with you if you can leave it where it will be absolutely safe. Make sure that any person with whom you communicate also employs the safeguards described here. In addition, don’t forget that using a phone in public, or in places that you don’t trust, makes you vulnerable to traditional eavesdropping techniques, or to having your phone stolen. About interception of calls Typically, encryption of voice communications (and of text messages) that travel through the mobile phone network is relatively weak. There are inexpensive techniques which third parties can use to intercept your written communications, or to listen to your calls, if they are in proximity to the phone and can receive transmissions from it. And of course, mobile phone providers have access to all your voice and text communications. It is currently expensive and/or somewhat technically cumbersome to encrypt phone calls so that even the mobile phone provider can’t eavesdrop – however, these tools are expected to become cheaper soon. To deploy the encryption, you would first have to install an encryption 38 https://zimbabwe.misa.org