what kind of risks are there with buying a second hand phone? I don’t know so much about how phones work. But for example with a laptop they could in theory implant all kinds of hidden spyware and backdoors in the firmware and it would be impossible to find it and remove it. The only protection against that is that we believe it’s so unlikely someone random would do that. So that is just an example what I’m talking about when I ask about what the risks would be when buying a second hand phone?

do they allow you to create anonymous accounts by paying with monero? And connected via TOR browser?

I dont think it matters if an email service is a honeypot because if you want E2EE communication then use Signal, not email. And if you are sending emails to other email providers then there’s probably not E2EE and it’s unecessary to be a honeypot because the metadata can be collected anyway very easily. Almost all data passes through Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Cloudflare.

Can I open an account with TOR browser and pay with monero without having to give any info like a secondary email or phone number?

They are very cheap, only $1 for 10 aliases and then then $0.1/month for any additional aliases. But can’t pay with monero.

NSA is infamous for illegal and unconstitutional mass surveillance.

I don’t have experience with that yet. Are you talking about a PI hole? Can you give a little idea on how to make such firewall rules? Because I want to have a laptop with many VMs or Qubes and each VM has different firewall rules. An email qube would only allow connection to the email server. Maybe one of the safe browsing VMs would only allow connections to the websites I typically visit. The unsafe VM maybe to everything except for known bad IPs/domains.

And NSA and other potential adversaries most likely have access to at least one domain that isn’t blocked by firewall.

You can buy for cents phone numbers online for one time verification purpose or even rent the number for long term if you need. It’s better to use these anonymous cheap throwaway numbers if you want privacy instead of your real phone number for everything.

Why not is the question and that comes down to guessing. Sheep do what they are told so don’t need to guess much there. Those who are not sheep have to go through a long journey to gradually keep increasing their privacy and unlearn the sheep habits we’ve been conditioned to have.

The end goal is to throw away your phone because you can do everything on your computer instead including buying a phone number, using voip and take and make calls. Phones are unnecessary spy devices used by sheep.