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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?
a neckbeard with a handle like KE5ISQ is smugly stroking said neckbeard.
lose != loose
Here's a sample:
"Just remember that the collective mood of society will change as the climate gets warmer and factions of billionaires compete over dwindling resources. The unenlightened self-interest of the global elite will compel the misery index ever upwards in their never-ending quest for economic efficiencies and infinite growth. Itâ(TM)s not a matter of âoeifâ an uprising will occur but rather âoewhen.â Ultimately people will mobilize as a matter of survival. And so your humble narrator, as he watches the baleful telescreens multiply, leaves this guidebook for future activists. Here are some tools. Get out there and use them. Good luck."
This guy belongs on Above Top Secret. Go off the grid? Riiiiight. I'm sure everyone will get right to it. Take an axe so you can chop your own firewood, too.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
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.
The FBI busted Russian sleeper agents using the WiFi across the food-court trick.
As such, I don't think the WiFi across the food-court would help the DNC.
See the story. There are many articles on the cell. Only a few mention the WiFi link. Quite a few debate whether the agents were actually sleeper agents.
If you try to avoid being tracked, that makes them suspicious, and they'll track you even more.
Living in proverbial woods won't work, the solution must be technological or legislative. Technological in form of encryption and p2p adoption so there aren't high-value, high-impact targets to breach. Legislative in form of making 'just because' data collection and breaching illegal, so it won't be blatantly used in the open.
Since almost all types of communication relies on computers now, it would be hard to get away from it. Phones can be tapped. Physical mail can be intercepted and read. Shortwave radio can be intercepted. Even point to point lasers can be spied on if you really want to put in the effort. Start using CB radio. No one would expect that.
Almost like the character "Brill" from the movie...off the grid and all of that.
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.
Even the evasion tactics they discuss wouldn't really work. Optical networking that isn't easily detected is one of your only hopes.
There really isn't anything you can do and participate in society at the same time... if you are a person of interest. The question is really if you can avoid being a person of interest at all.
Why should we have to do all of that to begin with? Why are we allowing this to happen? Is our government completely out of our control now?
Cover your body with tinfoil so they can't find you!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Fighting injustice is what should be done, not running away from it.
If in the fight you have to go off-grid for a while, then go off-grid. But don't run away from your government forever.
Suppose a twenty year old has no cell phone and no computer and never goes online. To a smart law enforcement agency they would take a look at that person. That person is off the bell curve of normal behavior. It could be that the person is severely handicapped or has some rational reason for being out of step with the world but more likely or not they are trying to be invisible. I'll bet all kinds of criminals could be caught by simply examining eccentric ways of life of individuals. How far does it go? Criminals with outstanding warrants or who are under investigation often flee to large cities with good public transportation as they know that a traffic stop is the most common way of coming into contact with law enforcement. A subway or public bus gets you away from scrutiny. Now if you travel long distance by bus you must get a clearance from Homeland Security. They require a credit card and not cash be used to buy a bus ticket and if you buy a ticket for someone else there is a $19. fee added to the price of a ticket. They call it a guest ticket. The feds also demand that hotels along the major highways only accept credit or debit cards. It makes it harder and harder for criminals to exist.
You can get off the grid: become a homeless bum, move to a third world country, etc. But there are obvious disadvantages associated with that. If you own a house, have a salary, drive a car, take a plane, see a doctor, own a gun, use a credit card, etc. you are being tracked. NSA surveillance is really the least of your worries. And the thing to recognize that most of that tracking has nothing to do with terrorism, but with financial regulations, taxes, mandatory insurance and retirement plans, gun control, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, equal opportunity enforcement, zoning, building inspections, etc.
That is, the progressive social welfare state is inextricably linked with government tracking and surveillance: government can't right the supposed wrongs in society, manage the economy, and help everybody to become healthy and smart without detailed information about what people do and want. So, if you don't like that level of surveillance and tracking, the only way is to turn back the progressive welfare state.
By all means, you should get off the grid. The sooner the better. In fact, if you could do it by Wednesday, that would be great. I'm willing to kick in a case of canned peaches to the first 50 people who get the fuck off the grid and stay off.
You are welcome on my lawn.
My wife and I have been using only 2G "feature phones" since we got cell service just before the turn of the millenium. (A cellphone is for use as a PHONE, darn it!.) And some "toy" bling from years ago that blinks a light when it hears them transmit. (Was interesting for looking at the schedule of their checkins with the cells, and confirming that they hadn't been activated as a room bug, which required much more air time.)
Still no guarantee. But there's less on them to be hacked, and you can always pull the battery if you don't want them to keep the net informed of your whereabouts or possibly act as a bug.
If we wanted to go cross-country without being tracked we'd have to shut 'em down. If we were serious about it we'd also use the old car that predates the serial-number-broadcasting, federally-mandated, tire pressure monitoring devices in the wheels, and avoid routes with licence-plate reading cameras.
We wouldn't do this lightly: The cellphones, in cooperation with the "Sync" entertainment center, also do the equivalent of OnStar, so we wouldn't have automatic 911 calls in a crash that rendered us unconscious. (But at least we can CHOSE to go somewhat dark - unlike those who have a real OnStar device, which has its own built in cellphone.)
But AT&T is shutting down their 2G service at the end of the year. So we'll have to buy and switch to something more recent (and no doubt more infiltrated by NSA.)
I'm considering going to an android phone running Replicant, to minimize (if not eliminate) the spyware opportunities. Not so much to keep NSA out. (I figure if they really want in they'll manage it, but they're reasonably good at not publishing what they find outside the spook community.) But more to impede other actors, such as identity thieves, industrial spies, private investigators, ....
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 it's important enough to the cops to find you, they will. "Off the grid" or on. Google Unibomber. Chances are you're not doing anything that interests them anyway. I'm not defending government snooping--just stating what I believe the facts are right now.
The whole point was the location was a terrible choice. Even if people aren't falling down ill I think we'll still see it was, in fact, a terrible choice.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
It's pretty simple - living off the grid, whether as an exercise of vanity and paranoia, or because one actually has something worth hiding, makes people more worthy of surveillance.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Turn around and look out the window. Hi there.
And on the plus side maybe they can tell me who robbed me three years ago
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.
The best way to hide is six feet underground in a coffin, because dying is the only thing you can do to get away from the government's attention.
But on the bright side you can still vote for Democrats!
Only if they know where to look. If you walked to Brazil and lived in the Amazon, nobody would ever find you there. If you were going to be tracked with $10B worth of surveilance looking for you and only you, you'd hide in Brazil in the favelas. They couldn't pick you out of the millions. There are similar places in the US to do the same thing, but in a foreign country, the search is harder, and less likely to work.
Learn to love Alaska
Only if they know where to look. If you walked to Brazil and lived in the Amazon, nobody would ever find you there.
Fuck that, too much work. I decided to get a job at an Amazon fulfillment center. Once in, I just never left. Nobody notices me, because I fit in. I'm typing this in on a cellphone I snarfed from my bin and I'm living on bottled water and energy bars. Just gotta avoid the supervisor, I think she's on to me.
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.
The moment government invented superior weapons, like nuclear bombs, the government has been out of the control of citizens.
Third parties are afterthoughts, and even the wrong first party candidate loses support. The citizen cannot vote for change. Minor change, sure, but that barely registers.
The revolution will not be televised. It will happen so slowly that any concept if control goes out the window. There is no control, only the occasional nudge.
We can avoid the iceberg if a lot of people take over the wheel, or if a few start it turning at the first warning. So far, neither has happened. Not significantly.
That's why we have to do this.
Places around the country have been criminalizing it. If you don't tie in to municipal utilities like water, sewage and electricity, they'll condemn your property and then arrest you for trespassing if you remain on it.
We need political solutions every bit as badly as technological ones.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Milton, is that you?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
US swimmers robbed at gunpoint last night.
Awaiting your mea culpa.
The Brazillians just wanted to make sure that the American athletes felt right at home.
/ducks
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
Further text not really necessary, right?
The problem with going more off grid is sooner or later private CCTV or federal agency will have facial recognition of a new person walking around in the wrong place, past a protected building, in a car, as a passenger, at a bus station, waiting for a train, shopping and a lot of connected databases will be lacking details. A random chat down will then be requested to get photo ID no matter the local stop and identify laws. Locals seen often may not induce such scrutiny. :)
If the federal gov and its private sector contractors want details, provide them with everyday normality.
Gov/mil digital entry into any computer system is now more legal domestically in many nations, so ensure a lot of keywords can be found and get used often
If your a journalist fill your computer with stories about political leaders at a state, city, federal level and start "creating" whistleblowing shorthand and hints of meetings to hand over details. Read up on impressive past political issues and recreate with emerging local leadership.
Go for bulk creativity and ensure a new supply of sensational new material every few weeks. Sooner or later the average security contractor, gov bureaucrat will work out its all just a random work of keyword fiction that halted their complex search.
Make long calls that mention party political matters a lot as background to a new story. Keep adding story details to your always online, cloud supported computer.
Drive around with several phones on, be sure to be seen by CCTV on the way to meet private sector or federal sources.
Maybe the informant could not make the meeting, but a journalist was seen for a few hours, just waiting. Electronic diary made a clear mention of that meeting...
If your a photographer or blogger, get a second hand DSLR with a long zoom and big lens hood. Be seen a lot in a city with different cameras and that fully extended zoom.
Desensitize private sector CCTV operators to be seen with a camera. Its just that journalist, their hobby, another first amendment audit on public land.....
Get real work done without a phone or free consumer computer that backs up the cloud or shares all keyword searches with a brand that enjoy collecting for the gov/mil.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This is a novel decentralized approach to social sharing https://ssbc.github.io/patchwo... It really doesn't address the threat of a state actor hacking your endpoints but it's a start.
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?
The city of Amsterdam has, by its own last estimate, 100000 people living in it that it has no idea of. And I don't mean the homeless: these people live in houses, pay and receive money (cash), have cellphones and children that go to school, and show up in hospitals which provide them with free healthcare (which those hospitals then have to balance against the people that /do/ pay). There are laws (and local regulations because, hey, it's Amsterdam) in place for each and every one of those aspects of their lives.
Sometimes, in this country, it makes sense to stop and wonder why on earth you should choose to live a, you know, /regular/ life.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
If you don't care, why do you bother posting about how much you don't care? A lot of people do care and your post's sole purpose is to say how much you don't want to participate in the conversation.
So you are saying only one side of the conversation (do care) should weigh in?
Being politically active is more than just trying to get people elected. But trying to convince others that they should change their minds, and as a population to change the direction.
For example in just the past generation, the growth in LBGT rights wasn't because of protests, and the political officials, but because of a brave group of people willing to show that these were normal people with normal needs and wants in life, and not sexual deviants.
It means humanizing the group, and putting there best foot forward. In terms of privacy, you need to convince people that privacy needs to be an issue. A protest even a large one shows just a loud minority. Lobbying your representative will only get limited appeal. But changing the culture it is hard work, but much more effective. And it is better than locking yourself away from the boogy man.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day...
- Kevin Flynn
Don't do anything the NSA would care about. It's pretty easy.
You need to convince me that being politically active (Voting for the right persons? Staging protests? Lobbying your representative?) is effective.
Cody Wilson proved that there's more ways to be politically active than just opening your mouth.
In other words: research ways to keep Second Amendment rights active even if the powers that be don't want citizens to have weapons. Armed citizens are free citizens.
But bottom line: civilization is a team effort. If everyone else on the team wants to go one way and you want to go another then there's absolutely nothing you can do except leave the team and hope there's another team out there that's running things the way you would prefer.
The moment government invented superior weapons, like nuclear bombs, the government has been out of the control of citizens.
I only partially agree with you. Nukes are not useful in a civil war because the point of a civil war is to gain/regain control of the country-- nukes defeat the point by destroying the resources. That's not to say that a couple cities won't be nuked if we do have another civil war, but it'll only be a handful of cases at most. The war will still be fought and won with conventional weapons in a scenario very much like Syria.
We can avoid the iceberg if a lot of people take over the wheel, or if a few start it turning at the first warning. So far, neither has happened. Not significantly.
Agreed.
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/
I can sail my boat around in the middle of the ocean and be utterly invisible to everyone. I could hike back in the woods and hunt my own food. I could be homeless in the city. What is about impossible is to live anything like normal life interacting with normal people and conducting normal business. Putting yourself in some kind of voluntary prison is not winning!
No. Refusing to send emails, use credit cards, or social media doesn't mean your personal information isn't still in databases.
Take it further and you're crossing into a 'lifestyle' of infosec where staying 'off the grid' will basically consume all the time in your day and becomes your life. Maybe *comparatively* to others a dedicated infosec lifer could say "I am 'off the grid'"...from a functional perspective they are as far as a person can get, but no one is entirely 'off the grid' unless they were born without a birth record...born 'off the grid'
This is waaay older than Prism or Snowden or even the NSA itself, and it is inherent to any situation where information is being mediated by a 3rd party.
It's part of existence in the modern world for large entities to have information about what you do...whether you are a serf in Europe in the 1500s or today.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Funny how the last sentence asks you to debate it on Facebook. Oh the irony!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
And on the plus side maybe they can tell me who robbed me three years ago
*shallow breath* "Costs too much. Going back to playing with drones and laser-guided missles. So much less energy" /sarcasm
Worth pointing out that it's illegal in more and more places. In many communities, the following has become illegal:
o storing rain water
o growing your own food
o not using electricity or not using an electric hookup
Technically, "going off the grid", is fairly difficult and frequently illegal.
That's ONLY because it screws up their census data and all... *snickersnort*
The folks in Iraq know all about drone delivery services and attempting to be off the grid.
Are you suggesting people who don't care have anything meaningful to say?
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
An impressive wall of text on those websites. I've not see it's like since timecube.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
http://pdfernhout.net/on-deali... ..."
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So many people say "But I hate all of the choices" and I say "Well get involved in politics and work to put better people on the ballot"
Done that. What I found was that political parties are private organizations with political monopolies. You can become a member of one, but all that does is provide them with a mandate. If you find success locally, the national level just funds your opponents.
# make clean sig
Are you suggesting people who don't care have anything meaningful to say?
They often seem to be very vocal.
I'm assuming you also have an actual bicycle.
A quick look at the Wikipedia article and I agree that this sounds interesting and relevant.
I see that it's divided into four states which sort of form a matrix:
1. for benefit of all + active = voice (talking to manager(s) or taking some other action to remedy the situation)
2. for benefit of all + passive = loyalty (waiting for things to improve)
3. for benefit of self + active = exit (leave)
4. for benefit of self + passive = neglect (showing up late, not giving a crap, being lazy)