Quotes from Tor and the Dark Art of Anonymity: How to Be Invisible from NSA Spying by Lance Henderson

We'll get into the nitty details later, but these are the Rules I've set for myself: - Refrain from routing normal traffic through it - Never do anything illegal (more later as it's a grey area) - Never put sensitive files on it (financial info, love notes, court docs) - Be as transparent as possible that I'm running an exit - If I get complaints from The Olde ISP (or university), I use this template.

Law enforcement and prospective employers who mine your social media presence for data are often worse than thieves who salivate when you announce on Twitter you'll be out of town for two weeks. Thieves, while unsavory and criminally deviant to be sure, rarely profess to be just. And thieves, as stated before, come in all shapes and sizes. If they take your private data without asking you first, that's stealing. Employers can be the worst of the lot, as hypocritical as Harvey Two-Face, demanding transparency in your life but not their own. Make an inflamed political post or drink wine on vacation in Bora Bora with half-naked Filipinas twirling fire sticks and you could lose your job... or be denied one. Not kidding. Mention you use Tor and you may hear your interviewer ask: "I noticed you're a big fan of Tor. Could you elaborate on why you need to use an anonymizing service? We like transparency in our employees." Yes, I was actually asked this in an interview for a position that handled a lot of money. It came out of nowhere, but what really bothered me was the casual way it was asked, like every applicant should have something to hide if they desire anonymous communications. Maybe I was some rabid fan of Jason Bourne and up to no good. At any rate, they did not like my answer. "Because I value freedom."

Any intelligence agency has unlimited funding to kill freedom by censoring all of us - even censoring the freedom to buy what you want to buy. With the media in their back pocket they can conjure any boogeyman they want to run over you. It's not illegal for them to lie to you, but it is for you to lie to them. This hypocrisy costs them nothing but costs you everything, so like them, you must keep on top of changes to good security, updating as necessary and being on constant alert of new zero-day threats.

One thing though: when you have not one but two or three silver bullets to take down a werewolf, the better your chances of staying invisible to any other lycans roaming around out there. Mind you, I'm not prejudiced against those with Lycanthropy, as it is no laughing matter. But then neither is herd mentality.

Tor and the Dark Art of Anonymity: How to Be Invisible from NSA Spying by Lance Henderson, English, May 16, 2015, ISBN: 1512049581

Edward Snowden. Quote from Permanent Record

WHENEVER I GO outside, I try to change my appearance a bit. Maybe I get rid of my beard, maybe I wear different glasses. I never liked the cold until I realized that a hat and scarf provide the world's most convenient and inconspicuous anonymity. I change the rhythm and pace of my walk, and, contrary to the sage advice of my mother, I look away from traffic when crossing the street, which is why I've never been caught on any of the car dashcams that are ubiquitous here. Passing buildings equipped with CCTV I keep my head down, so that no one will see me as I'm usually seen online - head-on. I used to worry about the bus and metro, but nowadays everybody's too busy staring at their phones to give me a second glance. If I take a cab, I'll have it pick me up at a bus or metro stop a few blocks away from where I live and drop me off at an address a few blocks away from where I'm going.

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What are the benefits of using a polarizing filter? Why is polarizing filter recognized among most photographers as an essential must-have filter? Does Photoshop or other equivalent editing tool work instead of polarizer? A polarizing filter allows you to; - control reflections from non-metallic objects; the surface of water, window, or glossy coating/painting. - prevent and reduce glare, still however, allow plenty of light through. It also makes subjects underwater transparent. - Enhance color saturation and contrast, especially under a scene of deep blue sky, vivid white clouds, spring greenery, or autumn color of leaves. Have you ever experienced, when taking landscape photography, ending up with a little different color from the actual landscape you have seen? The sky must have been more vivid and bluish in your eyes. A polarizing filter can properly contrast the crystal blue sky and the white clouds. Many photographers predominantly carry a polarizing filter, particularly for landscape photography next step after Lens Protector/UV filter in terms of protection, for some reason. The effects of polarizers cannot be easily mimicked with digital editing. Carrying a polarizer makes your image more vivid and clear, turning the actual landscape you've seen into your picture.

I add my own: polarizing filters are used to look / photograph through windows with glare.

Mounting and disguising a wi-fi camera on a tree

Tree trunk with a steel shim screwed on with a self-tapping screw.
The task was plain: to learn how to quickly put a shim on a tree and put a camera on a magnet for covert surveillance.

Tree trunk with a steel shim screwed on with a self-tapping screw. Closer

The camera itself, magnetized to the shim.

1080P Mini IP Wi-fi Home Security Camera

Permanent Record

The Sunday Times top ten bestseller. Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government's system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down. In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it. Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online - a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet's conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age. 'A riveting account . . . Reads like a literary thriller' - New York Times

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Эдвард Сноуден. Личное дело. По-русски

Edward Snowden. Permanent Record

Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent of US surveillance operations sent shockwaves around the world, the effects of which are still being felt today. In Permanent Record, the whistle-blower gives his side of the story, as well as detailing his personal background and the reasoning behind his actions. Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down. In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it. Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online – a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.

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... The fact is, no one with a biography like mine ever comes comfortably to autobiography. It’s hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid identification, only to turn around completely and share “personal disclosures” in a book. The Intelligence Community tries to inculcate in its workers a baseline anonymity, a sort of blank-page personality upon which to inscribe secrecy and the art of imposture. You train yourself to be inconspicuous, to look and sound like others. You live in the most ordinary house, you drive the most ordinary car, you wear the same ordinary clothes as everyone else. The difference is, you do it on purpose: normalcy, the ordinary, is your cover. This is the perverse reward of a self-denying career that brings no public glory: the private glory comes not during work, but after, when you can go back out among other people again and successfully convince them that you’re one of them. Though there are a score of more popular and surely more accurate psychological terms for this type of identity split, I tend to think of it as human encryption. As in any process of encryption, the original material—your core identity—still exists, but only in a locked and scrambled form. The equation that enables this ciphering is a simple proportion: the more you know about others, the less you know about yourself. After a time, you might forget your likes and even your dislikes. You can lose your politics, along with any and all respect for the political process that you might have had. Everything gets subsumed by the job, which begins with a denial of character and ends with a denial of conscience. “Mission First.” Some version of the above served me for years as an explanation of my dedication to privacy, and my inability or unwillingness to get personal. It’s only now, when I’ve been out of the IC almost as long as I was in it, that I realize: it isn’t nearly enough. After all, I was hardly a spy—I wasn’t even shaving—when I failed to turn in my English class assignment. Instead, I was a kid who’d been practicing spycraft for a while already—partly through my online experiments with game-playing identities, but more than anything through dealing with the silence and lies that followed my parents’ divorce. ... In the Intelligence Community, the “Frankenstein effect” is widely cited, though the more popular military term for it is “blowback”: situations in which policy decisions intended to advance American interests end up harming them irreparably. Prominent examples of the “Frankenstein effect” cited by after-the-fact civilian, governmental, military, and even IC assessments have included America’s funding and training of the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, which resulted in the radicalization of Osama bin Laden and the founding of al-Qaeda, as well as the de-Baathification of the Saddam Hussein–era Iraqi military, which resulted in the rise of the Islamic state. ... The CIA is the primary American intelligence agency dedicated to HUMINT (human intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of interpersonal contact—person to person, face-to-face, unmediated by a screen. The COs (case officers) who specialized in this were terminal cynics, charming liars who smoked, drank, and harbored deep resentment toward the rise of SIGINT (signals intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of intercepted communications, which with each passing year reduced their privilege and prestige.

Nothing is harder than living with a secret that can’t be spoken. Lying to strangers about a cover identity or concealing the fact that your office is under the world’s most top-secret pineapple field might sound like it qualifies, but at least you’re part of a team: though your work may be secret, it’s a shared secret, and therefore a shared burden. There is misery but also laughter. When you have a real secret, though, that you can’t share with anyone, even the laughter is a lie. I could talk about my concerns, but never about where they were leading me. To the day I die I’ll remember explaining to my colleagues how our work was being applied to violate the oaths we had sworn to uphold and their verbal shrug in response: “What can you do about it?” I hated that question, its sense of resignation, its sense of defeat, but it still felt valid enough that I had to ask myself, “Well, what?”

Edward Snowden. Permanent Record

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Эдвард Сноуден. Личное дело. По-русски

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Surveillance Detection

Part I: Surveillance Detection Basics

How To Know If You’re Being Followed

Surveillance detection is a fancy spy term for identifying if you are being followed. It is one of the best skills an individual can learn to protect themselves and the ones they love. In the “spy” world, being able to identify if you have surveillance or are being followed by the intelligence services of foreign government or a terrorist can mean the difference between life and death for yourself or anyone you meet. In fact, this invaluable skill is the difference between life and death in the real world, as well.

I reached out to my former agency teammate Mark Laine at Center Line Systems to talk over ideas for teaching some of the basic elements of surveillance detection. Mark is a real-life master when it comes to surveillance detection so I wanted to pick his brain on how to take our training and experience regarding surveillance detection and translate it into some easy techniques that can be employed by dads, moms, and citizens everywhere to improve their personal safety practices and protect their loved ones.

What we came up with is a basic guide that will cover:

1. What surveillance detection actually is
2. Why you should know if you are being followed
3. How to identify if you are being followed
4. Safety steps you need to take to protect yourself and loved ones from danger

What Is Surveillance Detection?

Surveillance Detection is a series of techniques that you can employ to identify if you are being followed. The word “surveillance” really means to “observe.” While someone parked outside your neighborhood or place of work who is watching your comings and goings is true “surveillance,” so is someone following you in a car or on foot. We’ve all seen movies where a guy looks in the rear-view mirror and sees a tail six cars back. Or when a woman walking down the street ducks into a shop to escape out the back to lose her pursuer. Ah, Hollywood… but this time they aren’t all that wrong.

Why Do You Need To Know If You Are Being Followed?

Whether you are a “spy” or a soccer mom, one of the biggest threats to our personal safety is complacency. Everyone wants to believe the minor confrontation over a parking space, the guy driving like a jerk on the freeway, or the creepy person staring at you in the shopping mall is nothing more than that. However, everything from how you are dressed, how you carry yourself, your actions or even the location you are frequenting may bring you to the attention of criminal elements. Worst case scenario, your child caught the eye of a predator and now he wants to know where your kid lives or goes to school.

Part II: How To Identify Surveillance

Are You Being Followed? In the world of an intelligence officer, there are many different types of surveillance and techniques to use to identify if you are under surveillance. In the civilian world we are more likely to face a very specific type of surveillance and we can get away with employing techniques that require less finesse. So, for the purpose of this article I will keep it as simple as possible so that the skills discussed can be remembered and easily executed when needed.

Again, situational awareness cannot be stressed enough here as the only way you are going to identify a pursuer is by paying attention in the first place. Identification by being hit over the head is truly a poor technique. Surveillance detection works for both travel on foot or in a vehicle and is executed through three easy tests… but only if you are paying attention. It may sound strange or as a challenge to your ego, but you need to train yourself to “pay attention” to your surroundings.

Three Tests

1. Distance Traveled Test
The concept here is simple. If a person or car is still behind you over a long distance, then you place that person/car higher up on your mental list of potential pursuers. However, this test only shows us one piece of the puzzle and if used by itself can produce false results.
...

2. Length of Time Traveled Test
The longer you are traveling, the higher the likelihood that someone who is following you is going to stand out or be noticed as you have had more “time” to notice them (that is, if you are paying attention). Chances are this person has not had the chance to change their clothes or vehicle and hopefully seeing the same person or car for the last hour will start to set off some warning bells in your brain.
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3. Change of Direction Test
Changing your direction of travel, either on foot or vehicle, helps avoid the random “going in the same direction” or “out driving around town for the same amount of time” random event. The more changes of direction you can incorporate into your routine, the better chance you have of narrowing down your mental list of potential suspects. If going from Point A to Point B consists of six turns and the same vehicle is behind you for each of them, well, you might want to pay attention. That said, this test is like the others, can produce false observations if used only by itself. For example, everyone uses this shortcut, this is the main/easiest way to get to the freeway, departing your neighborhood to the main street that leads to the grocery store, etc.
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Tips While Driving

As you begin to practice this skill, start concentrating on those three tests as you drive or walk around. If you have been driving across town in a straight line, take a few turns out of your way. Doing so will help you determine if someone is following you by isolating, or weeding out, a lot of the cars you’ve seen driving behind you up to that point. Throw in a few stops to increase your driving time and add some turns between stops to further narrow down the list of potential vehicles. Jump back on the main road and repeat.

Tips While On Foot

If you are on foot walking downtown from Point A to B, conduct your route in the same way. Change directions and keep an eye on anyone that may be behind you. Remember, your urban environment provides all kinds of opportunities to look behind without “looking behind”. Think about using reflections in windows, doors, bus stops, and windshields of passing vehicles to see who is behind you. To add some time to your walk, stop to read a menu posted outside a restaurant, duck into a store to grab a coffee or use a restroom. Most folks will pass you by if you do.

So you don’t appear paranoid by looking behind you constantly and raising other people’s suspicions, add some turns to your route. As you turn, swivel your head to see where you came from – this is normal as you should look left and right before crossing traffic! This technique is great because it forces you to always change directions and can be done mindlessly to always know what is going on behind you. Think situational awareness and repeat until you are able to determine if someone is or is not following you… then decide what to do next!
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Part III: What To Do After Confirming Surveillance

Steps to Take After Identifying You Are Being Followed What should you do if you have identified that you are being followed? Simple – get to safety!

Let’s back it up for a second. What if (seeing as all of this is new to you) you are not totally sure if this person has been following you or it’s just a random event or your imagination? Well, Hollywood isn’t the real world, which is where you are located and where there are actual laws and consequences, so trying to “lose” them is stupid, dangerous, and probably not going to work for you. However, here are a couple easy, safe and legal ideas that you could try:

Simply turn around… pull into any area that easily and quickly allows you to turn around and go back the way you just came. It really would be beyond coincidental if that suspect vehicle behind you performed the same maneuver, wouldn’t it? If you are on the freeway and there is an off-ramp that has an immediate on-ramp as well, then just exit the freeway, wait until it is safe to cross traffic and simply drive back onto the freeway. Again, I would call this a pretty solid clue if that suspect vehicle does the same thing.
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Stay Calm, Change the Situation

Stay calm and change the situation to your advantage and personal safety. Call 911 and drive to the nearest police or fire station. If there isn’t a station nearby, think of a well-lighted and public location that would provide you with easy escape routes, where you can also easily keep this person in view (from a safe distance), where law enforcement can easily find you, or where it is obvious there are lots of video cameras or security guards. Don’t let the bad guy get the advantage. Avoid places such as roads or alleys where you could become stuck, blocked in, cut off or otherwise isolated, parking ramps, or any such place where maneuverability and visibility are limited.

Prevention is Better Than A Cure

Like a disease or illness, prevention is much better than the cure and good safety habits are the Vitamin C of personal security. So start changing your habits to include practicing situational awareness, creating surveillance detection routes, mixing up your daily/weekly routines, and the most challenging practice ever – stop communicating your schedules, events and vacations on social media!
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Teaching Kids Personal Safety

Knowing how to identify if you are being followed is a skill that could potentially save lives. And like situational awareness, teaching my wife and children how to identify if they are being followed is a fun activity to bond over while increasing their security/survivor mindset.
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Reno Dads is all about exploring fatherhood in all its glory. If you enjoyed this article, check out Teaching Kids Situational Awareness (expanded discussion on our podcast) and 15 Travel Tips From Former Undercover CIA Officers for more strategies on keeping your family safe. As always, thanks for your support.
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Full text - Surveillance Detection – A CIA Officer’s Guide to Protecting Your Family

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Обнаружение слежки

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
by Glenn Greenwald

In May 2013 Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the twenty-nine-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency's widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security and information privacy. Now, for the first time, Greenwald fits all the pieces together, recounting his high-intensity ten-day trip to Hong Kong, examining the broader implications of the surveillance detailed in his reporting for the Guardian, and reveahng fresh information on the NSA's unprecedented abuse of power with never-before-seen documents entrusted to him by Snowden himself. Going beyond the NSA, Greenwald also takes on the establishment media for their failure to serve the interests of the people and asks what it means both for individuals and for a nation's political health when a government pries so invasively into the private lives of its citizens. Coming at a landmark moment in our history, No Place to Hide is a fearless, incisive and essential contribution to our understanding of the surveillance state.

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Гленн Гринвальд: Негде спрятаться. Эдвард Сноуден и зоркий глаз Дядюшки Сэма

Скрытое наблюдение Дядюшки Сэма - больше не секрет. Тайны Агентства национальной безопасности раскрыты. Книга основана на сенсационных документах, полученных автором лично от Эдварда Сноудена. Впервые преданы огласке секретные материалы, касающиеся массового электронного шпионажа. Автор - Гленн Гринвальд, золотое перо газеты "Гардиан", признанный мастер журналистских расследований.

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Гленн Гринвальд: Негде спрятаться. Эдвард Сноуден и зоркий глаз Дядюшки Сэма. Бумажная версия на русском языке. (Лабиринт)

How to Combat Online Surveillance

1. TOR BROWSER BUNDLE
Includes all you’ll need to access the Tor Network.
Makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity: Web browsing, online posts, instant messages and other communication forms. Cannot prevent monitoring of traffic entering/exiting the network. While Tor protects against traffic analysis, it cannot prevent traffic confirmation (also called end-to-end correlation).
2. BLEACH BIT
Many features to help you easily clean your computer, free-up space and maintain privacy.
3. TAILS
A live operating system. Start on almost any computer from DVD/USB stick. Preserves your privacy and anonymity.
Comes with several built-in applications pre-configured with security in mind: web browser, instant messaging client, email client, office suite and more.
4. ENCRYPTION OPTIONS
AxCrypt / DiskCryptor / BitLocker / AES Crypt / Kruptos 2 / BestCrypt / CloudFogger
Create virtual hard drives which encrypt any files you save onto them. Many types of encryption.
5. PIDGIN
Chat software that allows use of existing instant messaging accounts. Supports Facebook, Google Chat, AIM, MSN + more.
6. OFF THE RECORD
A simple plugin for Pidgin. It encrypts all conversations held using the software.
7. THUNDERBIRD
Free email software. Add your existing mail account to it.
8. ENIGMAIL
A security extension to Thunderbird. Write/receive emails signed and/or encrypted with the OpenPGP standard.
9. GNUPG
Free implementation of the OpenPGP standard. Encrypt and sign your emails.

Source: How to Combat Online Surveillance