• Retroactive Surveillance

    From warmfuzzy@700:100/37 to All on Tue Apr 18 19:37:14 2023
    Did you know that your Smart Phone is always on, even when you've shut it down? Well it is, and it can allow for tracking of your location globally. Your phone pings the cell towers every few minutes or more and is basically a person tracker. That is why I (when I used to use cell phones) chose to use a Flip Phone that had an easily removed battery. Currently I don't own an active phone, but that is because I didn't feel like spending $300/year on something I don't really need. I have a house landline phone that I share with some people and I have two VOIP lines in my room so I'm not lacking a lot of capability to communicate, I just choose to have that connectivity apart from the use of cell technology. Plus the new 5G stuff can eat away at your flesh with its ionizing radiation. The one thing I might considering using LTE or 4G tech on is the ability to make a cell hot-spot at my mom's cottage where there is little service out there and that which is out there may be very expensive.

    Retroactive Surveillance can also be what I described in a previous message about spy satellites that do blanket surveillance of a very large area that gathers terabytes of image data every day. However, if you're the government it may seem worth it. So once again, I'd recommend doing your spook stuff in private

    Retroactive Surveillance could also apply to your online footprint. Many ISPs record every site that you visit, though with the use of encryption they can not read what you say or things like that, they can determine what sites you visit, for how long, and at what time. These are called meta-data, or rather the data that describes the observable data on a public or private communication.

    Another type or RS, is when you use a darknet the government might interrupt your connection to the service and check out what service in the darknet has gone offline. By such a method of selectively downing services they can figure out fairly easily if you are associated with the service that has been shut down. I'd suggest a UPS as one of the basic things to fight against this, but they're probably doing this outage via the ISP side, in which case I do not know how to effectively counter this borking.

    RetroSurv can also be used after a known operation has been conducted in a certain area. The people doing the surveillance would get a baseline of what were the sites visited by the local population, and then figure out how those comms have changed since the new folk have arrived, and if there are several connections going to the same strange website there might be a way to mark users according to who visited and when they visited QuestionableSite.net. To conduct such a surveillance would require the use of Big Data, or massive computing, but it can be done.

    Some things to think about...
    Cheers!
    -warmfuzzy

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  • From Greenlfc@700:100/71 to warmfuzzy on Wed Apr 19 06:11:09 2023
    Don't forget about ALPR and toll tags, too. Those also help investigators piece together your movements. Add cameras on public transit and ID checks for planes and trains, and suddenly you realize how difficult it is to move without leaving a trail, even if you go without a phone and use cash.

    There are some compensating controls, but really the most important thing if you're dodging .gov is to not pop up on their radar in the first place.

    GreenLFC º e> greenleaderfanclub@protonmail.com
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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@700:100/20 to Greenlfc on Wed Apr 19 08:27:00 2023
    Greenlfc wrote to warmfuzzy <=-

    Don't forget about ALPR and toll tags, too. Those also help
    investigators piece together your movements. Add cameras on public transit and ID checks for planes and trains, and suddenly you realize
    how difficult it is to move without leaving a trail, even if you go without a phone and use cash.

    When the San Francisco bay area implemented a radio bridge toll system, skeptics asked about tracking. Oh, No - we'll never track tags anywhere
    except when scanning for tolls, yadda yadda, privacy policy, yadda...

    A few years later they rolled out a traffic monitoring system that would
    tell you approximate speeds on the highway, and their data was
    subpoenaed for a court case. Turns out they were monitoring cars *continuously*. They had to send out an updated privacy policy and send
    every user an anti-static bag to store your transponder in when not
    using it. No fines, but they'd pass them on to the customers anyway.

    Now, they're rolling out toll lanes and tell people to leave their
    transponders adhered to your windshield 24/7.




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  • From warmfuzzy@700:100/37 to Greenlfc on Fri Apr 21 01:05:46 2023
    There are some compensating controls, but really the most important
    thing if you're dodging .gov is to not pop up on their radar in the
    first place.
    GreenLFC

    Yeah, I've heard that kids playing Grand Theft Auto were flagged by Echelon or Prism, where they were talking to each other while playing against each other in the game and the surveillance apparatus flagged them as potential threats. So sometimes you can be doing nothing really wrong and the System will mark you with a false-positive and screw up your life over nothing.

    Cheers!
    -warmfuzzy

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