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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?
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.
Umm... no. That really is all there is to it. Your muscles may need a few weeks to build back up if you haven't been exercising them, but chopping wood with an axe isn't a hotbed of technological innovation. It's pretty much worked the same way since the stone age, even though the tools have gotten a bit better.
If you try to avoid being tracked, that makes them suspicious, and they'll track you even more.
Reminds me of the early days of networking and mailing lists.
My wife and I ran a mailing list on a controversial subject, from a server in our home. This was back when civilian encryption was very new and deployment uncommon. We made a point (and made it clear to our subscribers) that NO encryption was used. Reasoning was this:
- If the police decided to check the mailing list (or other communications with us) for something of interest, and it was unencrypted, they could get what they wanted with a passive tap. They'd prefer that, because if they DID find something to go after, they wouldn't tip off the target, while if they didn',t there'd be no sign they had even snooped.
- If the police decided to check and anything was encrypted, the easy way to get it would be to raid the place and seize everything that might be evidential: computers, printers, backup media, answering machine, printed paper - and smash up everything else while they were at it. They'd have found nothing - but caused lots of loss for us. And of course they'd have trashed our reputation - deliberately - both to get a warrant in the first place and to head off claims of police misconduct.
So we "ran bare", made the rule that nothing illegal, nor confessions of doing anything illegal, could be on the mailing list, and ENFORCED that rule: To the point of ejecting a number of people, and one actually shutting down the list for a week (when a participant made it clear he was about to violate the terms) and only bringing it back, reluctantly, under a new name and new terms after being petitioned by many more reasonable users.
(Eventually a law change made it, in our opinion, too much risk and work to continue, and we shut it down permanently, after advance warning and migrating our users to another list, started by some of our users more dedicated to the underlying subject. Then I was free to use an encrypted tunnel when a job, shortly after, required it.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If the last time you swung an axe you were 35, and now you're doing it at age 55, without decent sleep the night before, slightly hungry, and pre-occupied with other things while you're trying to get the wood split... it becomes a very different thing. Compound that with the risk of injury being much higher due to lack of available medical care...
If you had just split a half-dozen logs last month, you'll know better your limits of exhaustion, technique to back up the log while holding it at a good height for cutting, how much to worry/not about sharpening the axe, whether an axe is the right tool for this job or maybe a 6lb maul works better on this kind of wood, etc. etc.
The water thing I personally experienced - after a Hurricane, my uncle pulled out his old pitcher pump and screwed it onto the wellhead - easy access drinking water. Literally thousands of nearby homes had no clue how to do that, even if they had a pitcher pump, which they didn't. Most of them, given a pump and a clue of what it's for, still wouldn't have known where to find their well head, and when they did find it, would have had to obtain extra plumbing bits to get it hooked up. If they had bothered to do a little bit of post-catastrophe prep, they wouldn't have had to wait for the National Guard to arrive with water for them to drink. Of course, half these idiots didn't realize that they had 40 gallons of clean water in their heater tank, either... and with no electricity, getting word around to them about that was basically impossible.
Depends on how much "to shit" you are preparing for. Hurricanes happen, and that can result in anywhere from a couple of days to a few months of "camping in your own home" afterwards. I doubt we'll all be hunting Pokemon one day and playing Mad Max in real life the next, it's probably going to be a bunch of little shocks that bring civilization down, bit by bit. And, the less civilization we've got, the longer it will take to recover from disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, floods, guys at the electrical sub-station screwing up and blowing the grid, etc.
It is nearly impossible to leave the grid. You will leave traces. Few and subtle ones, but you will.
There is an alternative, though. As a statistician by education, I know that there is something that is far, far more devastating than not getting much information. With little information, you can still work something out. The worst you can give me is poisoned information. Information where I cannot determine which is genuine and which is fake. This is by some margin the worst kind of situation you can put anyone in statistics (or profiling) in. Because then he really has nothing to work with. Worse, he may already have worked out a pattern or profile and doesn't even know that it doesn't fit.
How can this be pulled off? Well, it takes effort. Think of it as some kind of reverse SEO. Your goal is to get as many bogus information points to your name as possible while at the same time putting as few genuine ones in as you can. In the end, this evens out, if done right.
I would not recommend doing the old joke of buying whipped cream, condoms and doggy treats, but that's basically the direction this is going. What you do is you start a second (and third, fourth, depending on your creativity) persona. Give them hobbies and make sure you know a thing or three about those fake hobbies you're picking up. Let them go on vacation, find some pictures of the areas and tack them to your Facebook page. Express your interest in opera. Be creative, start playing an instrument for all I care. The more well rounded and believable your new persona is, the more likely it will be considered real while the few tidbits that surface about your real life would be considered false information or misplaced.
Yes, that's quite a bit of an effort. I didn't say you should do it, you asked how to escape surveillance.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Once upon a time, the absolute kings where having a grip of iron on population and would jail anyone having sedditious thoughts.
They would spy and jail people for what they were saying regulating every printed media.
But the populations found ways: speaking their own crafted language
Langue de feu (Fire tongue), javanais for some merchants
Verlan, (play on rules of construction) for priests and litterates
Slang for the thieves (using a lot of ambiguous use of legitim words else sending IA in the wild of misiinterpretation)
dialect and patois for various religious minority (elsacian, cevenols, yiddish)
François (initial french speaking) for François Villon my favourite polemist
Cockney for the dockers in London
Now think of it: what if you learned Navajo? NSA & else may have the capacity to intercept communication, but what if the clear text message is requiring costly human interpretation or making the IA get crazy because of the apparent non sense?
If going apple and pear is going upstairs, what the automatic NLP will understand?
You can pull an arrow out of your dead target and use it again.
Yes, you could, how many times will it work? Twice? Ten times? Once, for fun, I shot at a tree. 0% of the arrows were re-usable after that.
Sorry I deflated your internet tough guy routine with facts.
Yeah, your magic indestructible arrows, and 10,000 people per day lining up to break in, but they wait orderly in a line so you can shoot them all, one at a time, and take your magic arrow out and re-use it for the next.
.22 is a one-shot kill. Are you going to continue being a lying sack of shit, or are you going to act more than your 12 years? I did say that a shot to the chest would stop someone. a .22 to the leg won't take you down, but a hit to the chest will take out a lung or heart. A gut shot won't kill either. Well, it will eventually, from an infection, but the .22 doesn't carry enough energy to kill with hydrostatic shock, where a .44 could hit in the gut, and miss everything vital, and still kill. a .22 would have to hit something vital to kill. And no, you won't shrug off a .22 in the lung. That's fatal, and if not immediately so, it'll prevent you from breathing freely, and will eliminate the ability and will to fight.
My simple point is that:
1) you underestimate the amount of ammunition hoarded by the preppers.
2) Your magic arrow solution is much more stupid than anything you are accusing me of.
3) I never claimed that a
You refuse to answer clear questions designed to promote honest debate, and lie about what I say, and just ad hominem all over the place. Yes, for the first time, I insulted you, but you've been doing it from the start, because you know the facts aren't on your side, and all you have is badgering and insulting anyone you argue with, until they give up, so you can declare victory. Congratulations on winning every Internet fight, despite never being correct.
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