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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Turn around and look out the window. Hi there.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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/