OFF THE GRID
One man's venture into a land without data footprints
OR
How I finally managed to delete MySpace Account and Vkontakte
I was asked after my last post by /u/Skunkhunter23 for advice on how to move off the grid.
What I'd like to write, if I had a week off of work, would be actually not how to move off of the grid, but how to move on the grid without leaving much of an identifying footprint. That's for the professionals.
For the rest of us, simple advice for moving off the grid might be welcomed. For starters, I would like to give a nod to classical anti-grid efforts. Plenty of people have been interested in off-the grid living for a long time and some of these people have moved out into nature. As you can imagine The authorities know little enough about what red necks, hippies and anarchists do when you're more than about five miles from the nearest paved road,and tend to care little enough unless you climb mid way into the smuggling game or something. Outdoor survival classes are available for affordable prices. I think part of my strength, and my strategy, is that I'm comfortable sleeping outdoors if I have to, so I always have a trump card if I really need to duck out of sight for a couple of weeks. Television shows like "Naked and Afraid" actually serve as decent primers, although I can't stress enough that having actual practice before you're put int a do-or die situation will at the very least contribute to your comfort.
That sort of stuff is outside of the scope of this guide. Instead, let's focus on how to get off of the informational grid. Back in my country, I used to work for our intelligence department. We had three pretty good ways of tracking somebody, if we needed to figure out where they were, in order to get leads before we resorted to basic detective work.
Credit Cards - This was the big one. You would think that we had good information on people based on our "Files", LOL, but to be honest if we wanted to know where someone was at or what they were doing, credit cards were our best bet. The credit agencies always had better intel on people than anything else we could get our hands on. Your credit card company knows all sorts of things about you. If you want to do something secretly, you should consider restricting your credit card use, if you must use one at all.
Cell Phones - Especially at the time, burner phones were uncommon. We could could look up any one who had a cell phone in the database computer system. We could always ping the phone to find someone's location, as well. Usually we had pretty good historical information about which tower the person had connected to at a given time, and this only improved with the proliferation of cell phone towers. There was the one story about the guy in the division administratsya who caught his wife cheating on him simply because she was careless and kept bringing her cell phone with her when she went to her lover's house.
Cars, Lease Information and Utility Bills - Credit Cards and Cell Phones were the big two for us, but failing that we could check on car movements, usually associated with parking tickets or license plate readers, or we could look into the lease database or check on utility bills. Technically we were supposed to fill out form for accessing of mortage or lease information as this went to another department, but in practice this was only to prevent people from bothering celebrities. Parking tickets and utility bills were much much harder for us to track down, because the information was decentralized, was stored erratically and filed inconsistently because no one running the utility companies really considers themselves to be part of an intelligence agency. Honestly, I could usually track someone down with this if I needed to. One of my buddies caught somebody once because of a video rental.
What you can see, is that even in a country with a less mobile populace, and fewer civil rights, my government doesn't actually know much about you if you didn't own a cell phone, didn't use a credit card and didn't have a lease. My information predates the social media era, but I want to stick to facts and so it will be necessary for me to avoid speculation. Obviously the Facebook is a concern.
Other than that, we could try to track people using good old fashioned detective work, but without any leads generated by the above this was slow and not really that productive. It should be rememebered that Osama Bin Laden successfully ran a terrorist operation for several years while off the grid, and this during a period of time when half of the world's intelligence agencies were looking for him. FINCEN is a joke. The American FBI has respectable detective prowress, but they're good at catching terrorists and show little ability (or enthusiasm) for tracking down middle-rank drug dealers. Facial recognition science is in it's infancy, and can be thwarted.
Rather than provide general advice about slipping through security drag nets, I'll draw the reader's attention to a simple case study: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/serbia/2462297/Radovan-Karadzic-got-too-complacent.html The case study is interesting for several reasons. As you can understand, Радован Караџић was drawing a lot of attention, because he was a war criminal. Despite being on the run, he was able to run a high-profile business because his opsec was actually pretty good. In the end, he was caught because he fucked up on phone security.
I also want to make a point about Ross Ulbricht. I'm no friend of his - certainly don't want any association with a man running a website that sold not only drugs, but also arms. I do however wish to clarify that while people make fun of his opsec, his opsec was actually brilliant. He was eventually rolled not for operational failures, but for strategic failures.
If people appreciate this guide, then I'll plan to write another one. Unless someone suggests a topic, I'll expose why so much of the press and fear surrounding the stingrays is just so much hype.
SHOUTS OUT TO: /u/jjcooli0h for providing good followup analysis to my last post /u/RIP_Meth_9000 for being usually upbeat and hilarious Shadow Brokers Crew for smiting the wicked
No thanks to: /u/____delta____ for being loud-mouthed and overly opinionated American Yankee
Sorry for my English.
See also, "HOWTO Exit the Matrix" - one of the first awesome pieces of content on the darknet, and a very good one (although a little out of date at this point).