Your survival kit – Get off radar.

Posted by Pointman on November 17, 2020 · 9 Comments 

During WWII, the British developed a weapon to defeat radar called chaff. It was essentially bales of aluminum strips which were dumped into the night sky by leading elements of the bomber stream. The effect was that instead of the German radar operators seeing individual planes, their screens became filled with millions of radar contacts, and their problem became picking out and tracking which phosphorescent dot on the screen was a real bomber they could direct a night fighter onto. Functionally, it’s still done to this day, though electronically through various ECM (Electronic Counter Measures) techniques.

Every time you use the internet, you are tracked and everything you do is recorded, indexed and stored. Let’s leave aside the gross invasion of privacy it is and instead consider what a danger it represents to you personally. At this moment in time, and perhaps more intensively in the future, a file on you is being added to on a daily basis. It’s all noted. Every site you visit, every item you purchase online and even all your apparently innocuous activities.

They’ve got it all. Your name, DOB, address, occupation, who you work for, where you work, what restaurants and bars you visit, marital status, current physical location, your call history, who you’re friends with, who you like or dislike, things you like or dislike, what groceries you buy, how much booze you drink, what medication you take, where you bank, who you’re insured with, shoe size, sexual preferences, the car you drive, your politics, your physical location at any moment and whatever else you can think of. And all of it cross indexed.

To repeat, they’ve got it all.

Well, wassa problem Doc? It’s simple really and more than a bit concerning. We are in an age where everybody seems to be compiling lists of people. CNN keeps public note of what GOP congressmen haven’t yet congratulated Biden on his “win” and brainless but extremest maniacs like AOC are making public appeals to her equally fanatic and brainless followers to keep lists of all individuals who’ve ever expressed any support for the real president. Should the great pretender lift the crown, be in no doubt those lists will be used, and if they come to power, those list will become what’s commonly called death lists for some of the individuals on them. If you’re dubious about that scenario, you’ve never met a true fanatic.

Whichever way the Great Steal works out, it’d be obviously prudent for you to either stop using the internet altogether and do something like becoming a new age hippie doing the hunter/gatherer thing in some wilderness hellhole, or start taking some simple counter measures by doing the web equivalent of releasing great whopping bales of aluminum every time you go anywhere near it.

All the data collected on you in diverse ways is useless unless it can all be attached to your file, in other words, it needs to be collated using some unique identifier. Conceptually, and in reality with a few bells and whistles attached to it, the unique identifier is the internet protocol identifier of the device or devices you use. It’s unique, and in one way or another, connectable to dear old you. The obvious thing to do is to feed the spies a different address number every time you use the net.

Electronically, the unique single blip you were on their screen suddenly disappears or becomes a dense cloud of false echoes, depending on your viewpoint or intentions. It plays merry hell with the fundamentals of tracking and snooping on you. You simply visit the TOR project and download for free their browser. Install it, which is easy, on your PC, laptop, tablet or phone (eventually all once you’re comfortable with it) and instead of just having one internet browser, you’ll have a second one – a TOR browser.

Anytime you use it, you and your web activities are cloaked, much to the snooper’s frustration. For instance, Google goes to great lengths to not let you use their search engine while TOR cloaked because you’re denying them any useful information to sell on about you. Apart from such vested interests, the rest of the surface web is yours to browse as usual. All the non-invasive search engines such as DuckDuckGo have no problems and even have a souped up version just for use inside TOR to make your searches that little bit extra secure. Once you exit it, it forgets your search history, the sites visited and even about that browsing session. It’s all gone, it never happened.

There’s always the yebbut techie conversations about exactly how anonymous it is, but it’s been used for years by dissidents, journalists and others with very good reason to fear the regimes they live under. Examples abound of various secret police organisations trying for years to break into it to find whoever they’re hunting, all to no success, though they like to spread stories they have, to deter people from using it. They absolutely hate it.

This is a vital component of your survival kit because not only does it take you off their radar, but it’s also the method to access other secure services that can only be reached using it. I’ll be adding those services to your kit in coming articles. Without TOR, you’re locked out from them.

Look at the two browser icons you now have on your screen. One of them monitors and reports back on everything you do. The other is an information black hole.

It’s your choice which one to use, but I live inside it.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

The TOR Project.

DuckDuckGo

Click here for a list of all articles in the Survival Kit series.

Click here for a list of all articles in the Stop the Steal series.

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Stop the Steal, Survival Kit, Things to do today