Restricted Facility Life¶
Ways to talk to people when in a secure facility with restrictive controls.
Google Voice¶
Create a personal Google Voice account. Add a phone inside the SCIF to your list of call forwarders. You can toggle that on and off.
Select the gear icon at the top-right of the page.
Select the “New Linked Number” button.
Add your number. Voice will call you on that line and tell you a code.
Enter it into the web browser.
Now, you have a way to take phone calls inside the facility.
You can change it as often as you change seats!
Slack¶
Some facilities forbid web connections to Slack. If they do this, it is almost always for a good reason.
Note
Use the tools provided. Do not evade security controls!
To use Slack, you will have to use a non-web client. Many alternative exist. The author of this page prefers Sclack.
Create an EC2 or VPS instance accessible from the public Internet.
Ensure it has mutually valid A and PTR records in DNS.
Government facilities, in particular, tend to validate DNS in both directions before white listing a site.
They may require you to have page on 443 or 8443 with a valid certificate. Use Letsencrypt.
Remotely log into your new VM…
…using Putty as an SSH client…
…which is also available from the MEMCM/SCCM in gov/mil environments.
…using your web browser to hit a Novnc instance on your VM.
…or using your web browser to hit a Shellinabox instance on your VM.
Sclack looks like Slack and all your usual commands work.
