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'How I Went Dark In Australia's Surveillance State For 2 Years' (cnet.com)
schwit1 shares a report from CNET, written by Claire Reilly: In 2015, during the transition from paper to Opal [contactless public transit cards], Australia passed sweeping new data retention laws. These laws required all Australian internet service providers and telecommunications carriers to retain customers' phone and internet metadata for two years -- details like the phone number a person calls, the timestamps on text messages or the cell tower a phone pings when it makes a call. Suddenly, Australians were fighting for the right to stay anonymous in a digital world. On one side of the fence: safety-conscious civilians. They argued that this metadata was a powerful tool and that the ability to track a person's movements through phone pings or call times was vital for law enforcement. On the other side of the fence: digital civil libertarians. They argued that the data retention scheme was invasive and that this metadata could be used to build up an incredibly detailed picture of someone's life. And sitting in a barn two paddocks away from that fence: me, switching out burner phones and researching VPNs. When it emerged that police had the power to search Opal card data, track people's movements and match this to individual users, it was the last straw. August 2016 rolled around, paperless tickets were phased out and I hatched my plan. The Black Opal. The concept of the Black Opal is simple. Buy your transport card. Pay cash. Top up with cash (preferably in a new location each time). Never register it. Never link it to your credit or debit card. Live off the grid. Stay away from The Man.
[Reilly discusses the problems she faced:] All the top-up machines at train stations, light rail stops and ferry terminals were card-only affairs. One tap on that baby and you were back in the system. So, if I was busing downtown for a work meeting, I'd have to factor in extra time to get to an ATM, get cash out and then find somewhere to top up my card. Running for the train with friends, I was the one who had to divert three blocks, change jackets, burn off my fingerprints and find a nondescript corner store to top up. Here's what I learned. No one likes the paranoid one. [...] I finally came undone last week. Racing for a flight, I forgot about my Black Opal. I'd had an unusually busy week on public transport, and my balance was low. On the train to the airport terminal, it hit me. Did I have enough money on my card to pay the AU$17.76 tap-off fee that they use to gouge tourists at the airport? As I rode up the escalators and the exit turnstiles came into view, my heart sank. No ATM. No cash in my wallet. Just a row of bright green Opal readers and a top-up machine. Card only. With one trip, my years of off-grid living were undone. I slumped against the top-up machine and swiped my debit card. I was just 9 cents short, but it cost me so much more than that. My Black Opal was dead.
[Reilly discusses the problems she faced:] All the top-up machines at train stations, light rail stops and ferry terminals were card-only affairs. One tap on that baby and you were back in the system. So, if I was busing downtown for a work meeting, I'd have to factor in extra time to get to an ATM, get cash out and then find somewhere to top up my card. Running for the train with friends, I was the one who had to divert three blocks, change jackets, burn off my fingerprints and find a nondescript corner store to top up. Here's what I learned. No one likes the paranoid one. [...] I finally came undone last week. Racing for a flight, I forgot about my Black Opal. I'd had an unusually busy week on public transport, and my balance was low. On the train to the airport terminal, it hit me. Did I have enough money on my card to pay the AU$17.76 tap-off fee that they use to gouge tourists at the airport? As I rode up the escalators and the exit turnstiles came into view, my heart sank. No ATM. No cash in my wallet. Just a row of bright green Opal readers and a top-up machine. Card only. With one trip, my years of off-grid living were undone. I slumped against the top-up machine and swiped my debit card. I was just 9 cents short, but it cost me so much more than that. My Black Opal was dead.
I only read the headline (mea culpa) but talk about the best way to raise a red flag... you want to blend in...
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-...
Now what?
What if you tapped in with a card bought for cash, then "lost the card on the train?" Could you buy another card in the final station to "tap out", thus preserving the sanctity of the "Black" Opal card?
Where is the link to TFA?
Instead just enough money on your card for one trip you should have put $40 or $50 at a time on it. Then you wouldn't be constantly running around trying to add more. Moron.
The "black opal" idea is fairly ridiculous. Home IP + work IP is enough to uniquely identify someone. Simply tapping out at the airport might be enough to de-anonymize the card: passenger manifests are probably efficiently searchable by shrink-wrap surveillance software like Palantir's, and the small set of people departing the airport within a four-hour window plus some other weak bit of information is probably enough to uniquely identify you and thus all your past and future trips on that card. "Co-presence," this kind of correlation, is not exotic. It's the typical goal of these whole-take surveillance systems, so I would expect the attacks possible with it to be in use.
In London I think you can turn in your Oyster card and get a refund in cash, which you can then use to get a new Oyster card a couple hours later with a different serial number, but of course nobody does that so it might be like wearing a kick-me sign to attempt evasion that way. I don't know.
This is exactly why you have TWO cards. One that you use only occasionally that is traceable and used only for emergencies, and one that you use mostly, which you top up with loads of cash (and cash only), and keep frelling topped up. If you're really paranoid, you cycle the cash-only one every month or two for a new one, and don't frelling worry about the last dollar-and-a-half when you ditch it.
Basic engineering: make allowances for cockups.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Why did she hold onto one single card for so long and keep topping it up?
You'd think somebody who was truly paranoid would have multiple cards, and routinely discard older cards and acquire new cards through unorthodox means. For example, if you hang out at the airport outside the "tap off" exit from the train, you can find a lot of tourists who are flying out and just want to discard their old transit card. Or put just enough to "tap on" (there's usually a minimum balance to enter the train station) on your old cards, and then find homeless people who have a near-zero-value card and trade with them-- they get into the station, you get a new anonymous card with some random travel history on it.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
We have the perfect opening crawl for the next Star Wars film. It's better than reading about trade disputes....
she fails at the most basic thing about going dark and that is blending in. Instead she sticks out like a light bulb due to her behaviour. What you want to do is have general behaviour, be that web browsing, train and bus trips etc. But then when you don't want to be tracked that is when you use the alternate card, the VPN etc. using those methods for everything is just calling attention to yourself.
Would have appeared in CCTV and various other mediums of surveillance.
A little known loophole: Your Opal card can go into negative balance. So long as you have enough balance to tap on, you can always tap-off. Tap on with $2.50 credit, tap off for $17.76, throw the card away and get another one. Simples! (You have been living off the grid for 2 years but you didn't know this? Hmm...)
Buy your transport card. Pay cash. Top up with cash (preferably in a new location each time). Never register it. Never link it to your credit or debit card. Live off the grid. Stay away from The Man.
Ya, because acting like that isn't suspicious. "The Man" knows someone is paying for that unregistered, un-linked card w/cash, at different locations. They know the card number, they know where and when it was reloaded and used. They have CCTV cameras. They have a picture of you from somewhere you used it and, if you have any official ID -- driver license, passport, etc... -- they can match them up. They know who you are, what you're doing and where you're doing it. They have devices to identify the mobile phone(s) you're carrying and can track them if they want to.
Either they've been tracking you all this time or determined that you're an idiot and have been ignoring you all this time.
Why do you think businesses and governments encourage, and make it easy to use, electronic payment systems over cash? Identification and tracking.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is a serious question. Whenever a US data privacy debate pops up online, Australians seem to weigh in with Europeans in calling privacy a paranoid American concern. When the government told them to turn in their guns, they did so in concern for the greater good. Why not agree to have their movements tracked and their telephony metadata archived? It's for the greater good too, isn't it?
Why did she hold onto one single card for so long and keep topping it up?
You'd think somebody who was truly paranoid would have multiple cards, and routinely discard older cards and acquire new cards through unorthodox means. For example, if you hang out at the airport outside the "tap off" exit from the train, you can find a lot of tourists who are flying out and just want to discard their old transit card. Or put just enough to "tap on" (there's usually a minimum balance to enter the train station) on your old cards, and then find homeless people who have a near-zero-value card and trade with them-- they get into the station, you get a new anonymous card with some random travel history on it.
I do all you described, and one more --- I dumpster dive, a trick I learned back in the 80's and 90's
Why did she hold onto one single card for so long and keep topping it up?
Because she's an idiot, who thinks she's James Bond, who wanted to write a seemingly clever story.
To digress a bit... It's like this chick, Hephzibah Anderson, and her book Chastened about her voluntary year of chastity. Turns out she just stopped having penetration - gave up the “last base” (her words). Still went on dates, still kissed, still fondled, but she drew the line at that – kiss, kiss, no bang, bang. How she must have suffered. So she writes a book about it and gets famous? Please. What the fuck is wrong with people that this is interesting or even worthy of more than a passing thought? Why is anyone even talking to her, about this? Because she’s young? blond? pretty? English? WHAT?? And who names their daughter “Hephzibah” anyway?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Its pretty clear she didn't understand how meta data is used to identify people and that this whole excise was a just a nice thing to say at dinner parties...
Being truly paranoid, is a rare skill in our times.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This has been the law in Europe for some time now. The data retention time can be up to 2 years, the laws are different between countries.
opal cards are free, so you should be discarding them, and getting a new one, every trip.
if you're reusing a card, it would be trivial to cross reference your travel times with social media access, phone records, and identify you.
wrt airport, you should certainly be discarding when you go to the airport. you need ~$4 credit to tap on, when you tap off, this goes to -$13. then discard the card!
this guy isn't thinking.
If you don't mind a bit of walking (15 min.), go to Wolli Creek station. The ticket is $3.50 instead of $18
... the solution is really a social one. ;-)
Lighten up Claire (pun intended
What the man dreads is critical mass. The man is just the point-1 percent, rmember? That critical mass will come, in fact it's already there, and my bet is that that smartphone you're going to get will be more of a help than a hinder when the time comes. It may even be a prerequisite.
That just makes you stick out more because you don't fit into the normal boxes - doesn't use card in standard pattern etc... Instead of having just a few files like those kept on everyone he's probably got a few extra.
And thinking you are anonymous if a joke. Doesn't matter what card you use, they can match it to cctv. Same for all the rest. The dots connect.
This is a philosophocal issue that has powerful repercussions in society. Not a good combo as most people (quite reasonably) dgaf. It's esoteric shit that has immense power but only if everyone gets it. We're fucked...
They called me the nameless one, the ghost who commutes, the silent passenger who refused to get an Opal transport card.
I doubt "they" called you any of those things -- especially since you actually *had* an Opal transport card (that you simply paid for w/cash).
I'm going to call you "pretentious".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Australians are more monitored than most it just happens that the gov has outsourced it to companies and the USA
This all falls apart with facial recognition, there is little point worrying about your Black transit pass. Virtually all transport stations have full camera coverage, within a decade they will also have facial recognition capability whether it is used or not will depend.
Now you don't want to do anything so damaging that you could be put in prison, so you need to take a page out of the US manual on sabotage and make small expensive attacks that can't be easily pinned on you nor at first glance appear to be more than the stupidity of youth rather the coordinated efforts of an anti-gov't group.
First off you should take a look at the machines for toping up your card. What can you do to make them unusable? Easy one would be to jam a piece of plastic or paper into the credit card reader. Or better yet fill it with some quick set epoxy and one of those opal cards that haven't been used for anything yet. (Obviously something without your name on it) for a more permanent fix. Basically you made that machine unusable until they can get around to repairing it. Other simple items would be big pack of stickers, the kind that fall apart when you try to pull them off and stick them in the middle of any screen you come across.
The other would be to try to attack the Opal cards directly. Can a piece of metal tape over the scanners block the card from reading? How about an extra thick piece. A little experimentation with the cards and electrical or magnetic fields might reveal a solution. If you could make something portable that you could walk near people that erased or scrambled cards you would have a winner.
If you have no imagination or technical skills it could be as easy as "accidently" dumping a sticky drink on a seat as you go to leave. You don't want to do this every day, but every once in a while. Get like minded people to do the same so the damage can't be pined on any one person and you'll effectively shut down a large portion of the usability and more importantly profitability.
Firstly Opal cards typically let you tap off with a negative balance. In fact itâ(TM)s been a relatively well known exploit for getting a cheaper fare to the airport. There are plenty of articles out there on the loophole, but none as far as I can see on it being closed. Iâ(TM)m pretty sure my balance has gone negative recently, but I suppose it is possible they have put different restrictions in at the the airport. Secondly, anyone paranoid about privacy would discard their Opal card (they are free) when it ran out of credit and get a new one so that trips arenâ(TM)t connected over time and one use of a debit card to top up wouldnâ(TM)t connect their whole history.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Depends on how criminal the State is.
At some point to be law abiding means abetting crimes, even murder, and/or being suicidal.
At some point many States want more than you earn, stealing your savings.
Some slaves, with enough goodwill, courage and intelligence, successfully escape.
She's an idiot. If you want to stay off the grid while using transport cards, you have to use many, preferably previously used/empty ones. If you use only one, it doesn't matter whether you pay cash every time and not register it, it is still that one identifiable card that tracks you.
Place a card next to a smartphone and the magnetic stripe gets wiped. This happens to those paper tickets that the ticket machins at British Rail and the London Underground print out.
Its pretty clear she didn't understand how meta data is used to identify people and that this whole excise was a just a nice thing to say at dinner parties...
Care to elaborate on how the authority would deploy the 'meta data' in tracking down people who do not want to be tracked?
Thanks !
"Did I have enough money on my card to pay the AU$17.76 tap-off fee that they use to gouge tourists at the airport?"
The price is not rounded to the nearest decimal, or 5c mark. It seems expressly designed to remind people of the 1776 revolution.
Similar to those "time to the city" signs -- the one they set up south of Boston is stationed at exactly 9 miles, and it's often slightly slower than 60 mph in traffic -- so, many, many mornings, commuters from the south will be reminded of "9/11", via "9 miles, 11 minutes".
the owners have you ...
As the legend would have it:
Crocodile Dundee will henceforth have different associations:
Unless you're willing to completely secede from civilization and live in a shack in the woods, you can't "go dark" in a modern Western country anymore. Surveillance and tracking technology has progressed too far -- automatic license plate recognition, facial recognition, networked CCTV in all public places, rooted IoT devices (many with microphones and cameras), electronic financial transactions, public governmental records made available online, telephone voice and text all recorded and tapped, not to mention Internet traffic subjected to completely pervasive monitoring.
David Brin had a lot to say about this in "The Transparent Society" many years ago. Technological developments all seem to accrue in favor of the watchers -- their tools get smaller, cheaper, and more powerful every day. And if you think laws will stop them, good luck with that.
A rose is a rose is a rose. She was never dark. One of her many aliases was the number of the card. Its every move was tracked. Even the cash refills.
If they've got distributed database search capabilities, I bet they could peg her name with a query alone - something like which individual used their card to get cash at the nearest ATM to this card's refills within 10 minutes of a refill the greatest number of times.
I'd also bet they periodically run a query to list all cards that have never been linked to an identity and have been filled a bunch of times over a period of more than a few months. The list would be a short, rich target ground for people on the lam. If they have a regular travel pattern, it would be easy to check them out.
"Public transportation is for losers."
Because the story is stupid. So much effort to stay off grid, but can't figure out that you need to keep your card topped up before travelling? Sounds like a teenager wrote this.
I have a cash Opal card, I keep the balance above $50 at all times for this reason. The one time I did lapse and ran out of balance I simply took the train to one of the many stations out of the CBD that don't have exit turn-styles. You simply walk out and you're free.
Not available in AUS?
Available in the US in any grocery store and likely many others (I don't get out much).
My wife needs to write a book like that.
Unless an inspector comes on board. Then you're well and truly in the system.
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I agree two cards is a better idea so you can use a trackable one in a pinch....
But I really shouldn't understand the philosophy of keeping the card with around $20 of credit. If I were trying what he did I would have $100 of credit or so if possible, refilling any time it dropped below $50... being able to take several trips without an immediate refill.
However there is a giant hole in his plan. He was always using ATMS pretty much right before filling, so I'm almost certain they were matching cameras from the ATM and the cameras on the transit refill and they knew exactly who it was who had been filling his "dark" card. Temporal separation would be better but ideally he'd have his face totally covered while filling the transit card, or else they can match his face with other info pretty simply.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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What I don't get is that all she had to do was say she LOST her card! She would get fined (i.e. most likely need to pay the highest price ticket between destinations), and would have been given a new card for just this one transaction, which would have been tied to the credit/debit card. And she could then have continued using the "black card" for later trips....
You'd think somebody who was truly paranoid would have multiple cards, and routinely discard older cards and acquire new cards through unorthodox means
Especially as in the case of OPAL, the card itself does not cost anything (as opposed to myki in Melbourne for example). There was no additional cost or effort in getting a new card each time she would have topped up with cash..
GIven you can just have the balance go negative when you tap off the entire article makes no sense at all.
Last time I was in Oz the opal card went in the bin when I got to the airport since it was at about $-10, and who would pay $10 to get the balance to 0 when you can just pay $10 for a new $10 balance card...
Using those methods only when your up to no good tells the surveillor exactly when you are up to no good. If you are already personally under surveillance switching off location services, or switching on a VPN etc, is a dead giveaway. In any case, switching those thing you believe give you security on or off, is itself meta-data.
You can let pre-paid (unregistered) Opal cards go into negative. They give you the benefit of the doubt that you'll top it up and pay the negative balance - which cost them : sydney commuters using unregistered opal cards to underpay fares by more than 1 million.
Also - burner mobile phones? Not in Australia - impossible to obtain one legally.
Also, new Opal cards are free. She should have been getting a new one every 1-6 months, especially since that's the only way to provide perfect forward secrecy with this system, avoiding the "loss" of 2 years of anonymous travel when she inevitably blew her cover using a bank card.
Lady, you were never anonymous if there was enough effort to pin you down to that card. Just tie the time of tap on with security footage. You aren't important enough to go to the effort though.
Pass is swiped on machine at entry to bus. There is no swipe upon exit from bus. All bus routes both in and out of downtown are handled the same way.
There is no deduct done on swipe as pass is fixed $20.00 per calendar month.
System knows when each card is swiped to board the bus. System does not know when you get off the bus. Swipe is via mag stripe, not presence. In fact, if you want to use credit card, you have to go to the window. Machine only takes cash.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
That's still following the letter of the definition, if not the spirit. Chastity just means the abstainment of sexual intercourse. I.E. no penile penetration of her genitalia since she was female.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
She could have just buy a new opal and top it up with her credit card and use it for that trip only, and then destroy it and use her black card again once she has access to atm somewhere else.
For the paranoid amongst you (including BeauHD):
Sydney trains has video coverage of every ticket gate. So use of an ID-less Opal Card could act as an instant trigger for the video to be retained. By using a Black Opal card you have pre-qualified yourself for surveillance.
Which part of Australia? I call bullshit. Aussies buy a $4 coffee using EFTPOS. Hell, I went to a bar in Canberra that wouldn't even accept cash! Aussies do stupid shit to get on tv, we post everything to Facebook, we have number plate recognition instead of toll booths on the roads. We have bars e.g Brisbane CBD that scan drivers licences before admission.
Australians may be descended from criminals but they love pointless laws, logs and regulations.
It is all good and whatnot but did she have the cellphone with him?
Then the stupid "avoiding the Man" wont work. You are triangulated by using cellphone data.
It's a good story in the press but this person is hardly unique.
I only fill up my transit cards with cash (whenever I can) and recycle them every so often, but I don't have breathless stories in the press about how amazingly black my Oyster, OV, etc cards are.
I just like making total surveillance more difficult.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the entire tale is a huge fabrication, as some others have said, if she had been truly committed to staying dark, there are numerous ways she could have protected herself.
But at a minimum she invented a lot of the "drama" around her supposed travails, all the hand wringing over planning, finding ATMs and so on. After 2 years of doing it, she should have been well practiced in the habits of planning ahead to have cash, to know where she can refill for cash and so on.
But the topper is when she finally "broke", why on earth didn't she just buy a new card right then?
It was until that moment "Card number $whatever", just not linked to a certain person. That and how this card traveled was still recorded. Should it have raised some flags with someone, e.g. that this card was suspiciously close to some interesting events frequently, rest assured that they would have spent the time and money to find out who holds that card.
Now those 2 years of going out of your way are rendered moot, retroactively. The card is now not only for all future uses "yours", but the profile collected in those past 2 years now can be tacked to you, too.
That's the problem here. It gets increasingly inconvenient to stay "off". It's not like they force you to play along, but not doing it makes your life very uncomfortable. It's the usual "punishment and reward" system of getting people to do what you want them to do. Show them how easy others have it that conform to your wishes and make people question why they want to have it so hard instead.
Worked with so many regimes in the past, why should it fail now?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Itâ(TM)s like 5 bucks, with $5 of value. This ranks high on pointless
What a load of crap. I'm sure there are cameras everywhere that get a good look at yer mug.
Why did she hold onto one single card for so long and keep topping it up?
Because she's the type who is paranoid without any reason to be. You expect rational thought here with a brain that is incapable of exhibiting it. She's not a terrorist or a spy, she's just a crazy person.
..is you Aussies have become a bunch of mary's and suck the big one on command.
Does anal count?
Is this a real story from a real person trying to protect and preserve her privacy, or is it a propaganda story made up by the Australian government to try to convince people how futile it is to try to protect and preserve their privacy anymore?
One day, here in the U.S., the average people are going to wake up and realize what's been taken from them. On that day I will laugh sardonically at them all for having been so damned dumb.
ATM's have video cameras, being the only person paying cash repeatedly to top-up their card made this person easily identifiable, not just in name but on camera. Carrying a burner to each of those locations and calling the same phone numbers you always call makes it even easier to connect the person paying cash to the ATM they got the cash from. Really ignorant on the author's part.
Couldn't she have just bought a NEW card list a tourist would and then ditch it? At best, the "man" could determine she visited the airport once in her life. She could have also called a cab, had them take her to an ATM, and then paid cash. Or, she could have walked. Or, she could have called a friend/family.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
... and then she can stop the nightmare!
The SF BART marks your card electronically when you get on and only charges you to get off. So they will lock you in the station if you don't have enough or if your card is damaged in transit. Hopefully the station's ticket booth is open to have a human help you get your card fixed and let you out. BART's tickets are not centralized accounts, the only record of your balance is on the card's easily damaged magstripe.
And yes, I was locked in the BART station in Daly City for 20 minutes when the magnet in my Blackberry's leather case erased my card.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I was suggesting the other day: Everybody should create deepfakes profiles of themselves and activists can take those and put your face wherever they want.
You can assume the government either is or will be doing this in the future, as well as corporations, so get a head start on them and provide the data necessary to do it, so that you can provably deny your participation in any recorded event because it can be that easily falsified.
Obviously the deepfakes technology will need improvement to stay ahead of provably false curve, but over time and with enough people doing it, it will be impossible to prove what event happened with which actual person and given a large enough flood of false data all these databases can be rendered useless.
In addition to this we need a new Anonymous op to get hooks into surveillance video feeds for adding/altering people in the recorded video feeds. There are so many cameras nowadays that without doing so it will be impossible for the average person to refute their comings and goings thanks to accurate profiling, facial recognition, cell phone location data and license plate tracking.
This is just silly. She was being tracked anyway by every other thing she was doing.
For one... Facial recognition is pretty mainstream now.
I had hoped that by the time we got to this point in the surveillance state that people would be totally freaking out but the general attitude seems very very "meh" instead.
And zero photos of this anonymous card use were taken?
Not bloody likely.
"They" would easily be able to figure out who she was should "they" decide it was necessary. It just would have taken 12 hrs, instead of 3 seconds.
A powered on wifi, bluetooth, or cellular device can be tracked around public places almost as easily. Ever wonder why cafes, book stores and restaurants all have free wifi?
Hopefully, everyone realizes that shopping malls track wifi MACs and bluetooth MACs too.
If you want to be anonymous, don't carry anything but cash. Don't use public transport, and definitely don't drive any licensed vehicles. A bicycle might be ok, provided the shop and traffic cams don't catch you.
The days of being private have been gone a long time. Until there is a privacy revolt, no chance they will return in any modern society. ZERO.
Being truly paranoid, is a rare skill in our times.
You're not being paranoid if they really are out to get you.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
No no, you got it all wrong again: being paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That is why I have 5 different travel cards. If one is burned I just lend it to visiting friends and keep using any of the other four cards. I also refill them in random order so sometimes it could be a year between I use the same card again, meaning that anyone who think they have nailed me, only have nailed one of my cards.
The OP also misses the problem with differential privacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). Someone just have to following from his home to the nearest card reader a couple of times and then perform a DB-query "who used his hard at station A around 07:50 day 1, around 08:15 day 2 and around 08:10 day 3" and most likely only one card will fit all three conditions. Then you are burned again.
If you're using an opal card and commuting around the city you're hardly "off-grid". Going from one end of town to the other you've likely passed dozens of CCTV cam's, both on the train and when tapping off, just walking around the city also. Your card may not be registered but if an inspector checks your card on a train they have the card number and your face from CCTV on the train.