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Can We Avoid Government Surveillance By Leaving The Grid? (counterpunch.org)
Slashdot reader Nicola Hahn writes: While reporters clamor about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, NSA whistleblower James Bamford offers an important reminder: American intelligence has been actively breaching email servers in foreign countries like Mexico and Germany for years. According to Bamford documents leaked by former NSA specialist Ed Snowden show that the agency is intent on "tracking virtually everyone connected to the Internet." This includes American citizens. So it might not be surprising that another NSA whistleblower, William Binney, has suggested that certain elements within the American intelligence community may actually be responsible for the DNC hack.
This raises an interesting question: facing down an intelligence service that is in a class by itself, what can the average person do? One researcher responds to this question using an approach that borrows a [strategy] from the movie THX 1138: "The T-H-X account is six percent over budget. The case is to be terminated."
To avoid surveillance, the article suggests "get off the grid entirely... Find alternate channels of communication, places where the coveted home-field advantage doesn't exist... this is about making surveillance expensive." The article also suggests "old school" technologies, for example a quick wireless ad-hoc network in a crowded food court. Any thoughts?
This raises an interesting question: facing down an intelligence service that is in a class by itself, what can the average person do? One researcher responds to this question using an approach that borrows a [strategy] from the movie THX 1138: "The T-H-X account is six percent over budget. The case is to be terminated."
To avoid surveillance, the article suggests "get off the grid entirely... Find alternate channels of communication, places where the coveted home-field advantage doesn't exist... this is about making surveillance expensive." The article also suggests "old school" technologies, for example a quick wireless ad-hoc network in a crowded food court. Any thoughts?
Article talks about getting off the grid and mentions ad-hoc network in a mall's food court... I think most people have a very different idea of what it means to live off the grid.
Chopping your own wood is a valuable skill - as is accessing safe drinking water when the electricity cuts out. Not saying that people should live this way daily, but keeping the skills available is actually a good thing. If you haven't chopped wood in 20 years, then suddenly need to do so, you might find that there's more to it than finding and swinging an axe.
The type of people who believe they are "living off the grid" in a Food Court would be laughed *back* to the grid, if not shot outright, by the type of people who really live off the grid.
To start, no, you are paranoid if you think the Government is interested in you as a person. You as a person have no value. Marketers also have no interest in you as a person. The Government and Marketers are interested in your social networking. If you live off the grid, you actually draw attention to yourself in ways you might not consider.
The average person:
- Buys groceries on their credit card or perhaps a debit card with their name on it
- Has a cell phone
- Pays for internet service through that phone, or through a wireline
- Has a television or a computer, may or may not subscribe to a television service.
The paranoid individual:
- Pays cash for a used RV, doesn't insure it, takes the plates off it and drives it into the middle of the boonies, and then takes a nailfile and grinds the VIN numbers off the RV in case someone finds it.
- Buys a years worth of food, in cash, primarily canned and dehydrated MRE's, since frozen food won't be an option
- Owns no phone, no mailing address, nothing with a serial number
Which one is going to be the suspected terrorist? The one that is paying in cash but can't be located. So let's say our cash-paying friend wants to grow a garden so they stay off the grid longer. They will have to buy fertilizer. Who else buys fertilizer? Terrorists making bombs.
Where as your typical person who lives in a city might buy 1KG of fertilizer and have a patio garden, the off-the-grid paranoid guy will buy enough fertilizer to grow an acre of food. (That's roughly 1kg per square meter, or about one square yard.) Intelligence services are really interested in that guy who is buying fertilizer.
It is better to hide in plain sight. If you are up to no good, instead of covering your tracks, you obscure your tracks so that someone following them has no probable cause to investigate where they lead. To take the "food court wifi hotspot" example, you would use a public WiFi spot to communicate with other "off the grid" people by having a preshared key to hotspot that exists in a space that nobody is actively aware of. Someone with a WiFi sniffer would certainly see it, and thus would raise suspicion if it's "Gustav's Secret WiFi", but not raise any suspicion if it's just "Dairy Queen POS" or something of that nature.
Likewise if you wanted to avoid the government or marketers invading your privacy and monitoring your purchases, first of all you'd buy pre-paid credit cards with cash, and second of all you'd attach those cards to ApplePay or something similar so that the transaction record looks like a regular card.
Prepaid Debit and Credit cards is the marketers gift to terrorists and paranoid people. Withdraw cash from your bank account at one end of the city, pay with cash a prepaid card at the other end of the city, nobody will know unless the bill's serial numbers were tracked.
Which they are. If you want to avoid being tracked by all means necessary, only pay in quarters.
No, but having the axe will. Not as much as having an AK-74, a SSG 82 and a few hundred 5.45Ã--39mm rounds.
But you know what? Actually living in a close knit community with nearby farming land and no large cities nearby is even better... And yet, somehow, I have no desire to leave Southern California which is a death trap if civilization goes to shit, for South Carolina, where I own property in an area which is perfect for survival (and where my firearms and bows are stored, since my wife does not want them around our infant daughter. When she is ten or so, we will have that conversation again, though)
I'm afraid that I will be like most other people here - my head firmly in the sand until it is too late to do anything about anything.
No good deed goes unpunished...
The real answer is to be politically active. If you are willing to put your life at such a disadvantage to live off the grid, you might as well put your effort in being politically active with the goal of creating safeguards in the system to insure our privacies are met and convince the general public that their privacy is more important than losing it for getting a marginal benefit of safety from the government enemies.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You missed the obvious. You can pull an arrow out of your dead target and use it again. It also doesn't instantly telegraph your location to everyone in the area. Your idea of one shot one kill under adverse conditions with a 22 is ludicrous.
I assume you think I'm 12 because I made you feel stupid and you have to take it out on someone in your mind. Sorry I deflated your internet tough guy routine with facts. You were the one chest thumping about piling up rotting corpses everywhere. You'll be needing more than 10 shots a day if that's your plan.
I'm not a prepper either. I do know how to shoot gun and bow. I know someone who was shot by a .22 and didn't realize it until he sobered up. He got better without going to a doctor. Admittedly, he was hit in his leg, not gutshot, but it does suggest limited stopping power. An arrow would have impeded his movement enough to notice.
And on the plus side maybe they can tell me who robbed me three years ago
If they were trying to solve crimes perhaps but this mass surveillance has little to do with solving crime and a lot to do with supporting the police state that we draw ever closer to. Stasi would be proud. Keep in mind that we spend billions on perceived problems while actual mundane real problems get ignored. For example, illegal immigrants have killed far more US citizens than terrorists yet we spend many times more dollars "fighting terrorism". The illegal immigrant drunk driving deaths exceed 9/11 every year.
citation:
http://www.wnd.com/2006/11/39031/