

Living Surveillance Free for a Day - kaa2102
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/surveillance-free-day-part-i.html

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jlgaddis
I've been doing this for the last month and a half, to an extent.

I've got a spare laptop running a relatively minimal installation and it
connects only to other Wifi networks (never any of my own). Thanks to
iptables, I can restrict outgoing traffic to only that which is running over
Tor. Yes, it's slow as molasses but for general web browsing I've gotten used
to it (just don't try to create an HN account over Tor -- a nice little
hellban will quickly follow).

I've got a new e-mail account that I registered while connected over some
random hotspot several miles away using a Visa gift card I'd purchased a few
months before. It's this account that I use (only over Tor, of course!) to
participate in various public mailing lists.

My iPhone (which I hope to trade in fairly soon) is off more than it's on. I
often simply leave it at home while I'm gone for the day. I haven't really
missed it and, on the few occasions I've actually needed to get ahold of
someone, it hasn't been difficult to find someone to let me borrow their phone
for a moment or deliver a quick message for me. I barely even text anymore,
who knows who is reading the messages I do send.

I work for an ISP and I have some things I want to do there too. I've pretty
much got free reign to do whatever I want (as long as it doesn't cost my boss
anything!) so I'll be bringing up a Tor exit node in the near future as well
(I'm aware of the implications -- I don't care). I'm hoping to have a talk
with my boss (who is 100% driven by the almighty dollar) about offering up
anonymous VPN services and accepting Bitcoin to pay for that.

On the ISP network, I've now gotten ~1200 residential customers (to whom it
doesn't make a difference) using private IP addresses and hope to add many,
many more to that figure. A Cisco ASA5520 performs NAT but doesn't log NAT
translations. If I get a "who had this IP at this time?" request, well, I
don't know, sorry. Deal with it.

I "get a check" from Google every month for the ads on my blog (okay,
technically it's a direct deposit). That was basically just a bit of extra
money that sits in my business account. It's been going to the EFF recently.

I've stopped paying for things with debit/credit cards. If I pull up my
account history, I can count the number of transactions in the last 45 days on
one hand and nearly all of them are ATM withdrawals. Hell, I stopped using my
"loyalty card" at the supermarket and had a random stranger get me a new one
that isn't tied to anyone's identity.

These recent revelations, thanks to Snowden, have completely changed my
behaviors. I'm not a "tinfoil hat" type or paranoid in the least, but I am
completely pissed off. I may only be one person and there's only so much I can
do but I will do everything I can to throw the smallest wrench possible into
this unconstitutional surveillance that's going on.

It's already a slippery slope and the NSA has been doing the equivalent of
pouring 55 gallon drums of Astroglide on a slip-and-slide that's laid out on a
steep hill.

(Sorry for the rambling wall of text.)

~~~
hahainternet
> If I get a "who had this IP at this time?" request, well, I don't know,
> sorry. Deal with it.

Who posted this fantasy about raping a woman that has now gone missing? Oh
well I don't know. Deal with it.

Your smug attitude seems less impressive when you apply it to a real
situation.

~~~
bowmessage
This is the same 'Think of the women and children!!!' argument that hasn't
ever been a valid excuse for surveillance.

~~~
dwild
Who are talking about surveillance? We are talking about identification of an
IP adress. If they were asking for everything his user has done in the past
century, and a direct fiber to every data... it would be surveillance but who
were using a single ip during a single moment, this is not surveillance.

------
pessimizer
[http://www.techweb.com/news/231602248/lulzsec-suspect-
learns...](http://www.techweb.com/news/231602248/lulzsec-suspect-learns-even-
hidemyass-com-has-limits.html)

hidemyass logs everything.

------
jdp23
Pro tip: setting up an auto-responder on your regular email account pointing
people to your surveillance-free account is not generally regarded as best
practices.

Inaccurate headline aside (the author is candid about the limitations of what
he's doing), it's a good illustration of how hard it is to cut down your
profile significantly, and the kind of trade offs you have to think about.

------
revscat
> I have to switch my iPhone to airplane mode

This doesn't work. The iPhone still tracks your location even when in airplane
mode. To test:

1) Turn on Airplane mode 2) Take a picture 3) Turn off Airplane mode 4) Go to
Photos app, "Places" tab. Note that the picture you took has been correctly
geolocated.

The only way to not be tracked by your smartphone is to leave it in a Faraday
device of some kind, like a refrigerator.

EDIT: Ok, not a fridge. Thanks, Titanous.

~~~
icebraining
Airplane serves to avoid transmitting; GPS receivers (like smartphones) don't
transmit, therefore airplane mode doesn't disable it. That said, it should be
enough to switch to Airplane mode _and_ disable the GPS.

But cellphones is general are tracking devices par excellence. One-way pagers
are safer, but the message is transmitted in clear-text.

~~~
revscat
I'm not sure that's correct. Phones don't talk to satellites for geolocation,
they talk to towers. If they are talking to towers then they are not passive,
but active. That means that even in airplane mode you are still being actively
tracked if the phone can see a tower.

~~~
icebraining
Phone with GPS - such as the iPhone - don't need to talk to anything to
geolocate, they just need to listen to the incessant signals sent down by the
GPS satellites.

Talking to cell towers can assist the GPS receiver[1], but it's not required.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS)

------
JonFish85
So this seems like an odd statement: "Bitcoins are, in many ways, the ultimate
underground currency. They’re even better than Visa gift cards, since they
don’t involve a credit card company or a bank at all, and since they exist
only as untraceable strings of letters and numbers." (keyword being
"untraceable").

Especially as this person specifically mentions Tor as only doing a "fairly
good job of keeping its users anonymous."

~~~
jlgaddis
I'm not sure I understand. What's odd about that statement? I got big into
Bitcoins about two years ago, meeting a random stranger in a bar to buy $9,000
worth in cash, but the statement is true unless I've missed something (I
haven't kept up with the state of Bitcoin so perhaps I am?).

~~~
JonFish85
I meant that if you're going to call out Tor as "reasonably safe", it seems
that you'd want to have the same warning for Bitcoins. My impression has been
that Bitcoin isn't "untraceable" simply because of the public ledger that is
out there. I just found it interesting that he called out Tor but lauded
Bitcoin's security more. Not a big deal.

~~~
jlgaddis
Gotcha, thanks.

------
gnosis
_" I also cover the cameras on my laptop, desktop, and cell phone with
snippets of electrical tape, since savvy hackers can gain control of them
remotely."_

One thing he missed is the built-in microphone on his laptop and cell phone.
That can also be controlled and listened-in to remotely, and it's usually
harder to completely disable (unlike a webcam).

Yes, you could epoxy it shut, but even then it could still function (though
with greatly reduced fidelity).

Disabling it completely would require opening up your laptop/cellphone case
and unplugging the mic: something that would probably void your waranty and
could be a nightmare to reassemble, depending on your hardware skills and the
laptop/cellphone model you own.

------
gr-eg
This reminds me of the documentary "Erasing David": "After anonymously setting
up private investigators Cerberus Investigations Limited to trace him, he
tries to disappear."

[http://erasingdavid.com/](http://erasingdavid.com/)

------
peter303
The author sounds like a way over-wired gearhead to start with. He every
latest gadget and app. No wonder it takes an effort toget off the grid.

