Walkie-talkies. November 2014. The Italian investigative programme Report broadcasts an episode titled ‘Siamo tutti oche’ (‘We are all geese’). The investigation exposes an illegal practice: geese being plucked alive to supply the down used in winter jackets. The team is in Hungary, near the border with Ukraine. Report’s correspondent, Sabrina Giannini, moves in on the clandestine farms alongside the German animal rights activist Friederich Mülln. When the pair are forced to run — chased by a farmer wielding a pitchfork — they keep in touch using walkie-talkies (see photo), travelling in separate cars. Why rely on a tool that seems outdated? Walkie-talkie conversations can be picked up by other radio users, but they offer a crucial advantage over mobile phones. They leave no digital trail. Police cannot later show, through phone records and location data, that a foreign investigative journalist and a leading German animal rights figure were in that area to photograph or film the farms. Mülln says he is particularly wary of the Hungarian police. The farmer with the pitchfork “will call the officers,” he tells Giannini, “and believe it or not, they’d take us — not him.” In that context, walkie-talkies become a simple way to communicate on the move without using mobile networks and their cell towers — and without leaving footprints behind.