Providing someone a voice/data plan without knowing their name is, surprisingly, legal across the US, Merrill says. Anonymous payments are trickier, but Phreeli will use a crypto system based on "zero knowledge proofs" to separate payment info from phone records—even if you pay with a credit card.

It's tempting to think of Phreeli as a phone carrier where every phone is a burner phone. But Merrill resists that description. Instead, he argues that anonymous cell service should be as normal as curtains on your home's windows.

Phreeli's founder is Nicholas Merrill, who became famous in the privacy world for refusing to comply with a warrantless FBI surveillance order sent to his internet service provider in 2004, demanding a customer's information. He spent a decade-plus in court fighting the order—and won.

A lot of this data, such as the T-Mobile leak, is now encrypted thanks to the researchers' work. But all of it was obtained from a single dish on the roof of a building in San Diego. These findings are based on just 15% of geostationary satellite signals over the US and Mexico.

That means a dish in a different place would pick up entirely different data. Probably an entirely different stream of unencrypted secrets.

As cryptographer Matt Blaze told me:

Their study, out today, reveals that roughly half of geostationary satellite communications they monitored were unencrypted. A flood of secrets pouring down from space, available to anyone with an $800 receiver setup. (And there's no doubt spy agencies have been listening, too.)