Surveillance Detection – The Friendly Drive-by

It used to be that if you were under surveillance, and therefore of interest to the government, but only a moderate priority target, it was an intermittent thing, and manpower would be limited. You’d get covered for a while initially by up to a twelve man team, and then coverage by a few people would come and go from then on. The intermittent coverage would update your file, and in some cases serve to heighten your paranoia, to keep you feeling isolated and under siege. This was reportedly used against the militia movement in particular. Once militia members began looking at all the people around them as potential surveillants they would begin seeing ghosts, ie seeing surveillance where there was none. Surveillance could then leave, the paranoia would continue, and the militias became much less likely to take any actions against the government. All that was required was a periodic application of limited coverage every so often, to perpetuate the effect.

Today, many more individuals who used to get intermittent coverage now get much more constant coverage. There can be several reasons for the more constant coverage. One is that for whatever reason, you are a high priority target. Another reason may be that you are a hard target, and surveillance isn’t able to easily gather information on you. Surveillance can’t show up on a low-priority target, fail to gather any information, and then just leave. They will increase the coverage, and the aggression of their tactics until they get something.

The final reason for the coverage increase is that government today has a massive glut of surveillance assets built up from the post September 11th surge, these assets have less threats to monitor now that they have gotten a handle on the terrain of the Muslim community, and they need to keep their edge sharp by keeping busy, in the event there is a need for a surge in the future. Many have simply been assigned to loiter around cities, using their vehicle units as mobile video surveillance of highways and bridges, while they wait to be assigned a mobile target to follow. Many others have been assigned to low priority targets, both to gather intel, and to keep their training sharp.

So if you get any federal coverage today, it is more likely to be a full fledged, high manpower affair, even if you are little more than a low-priority, low threat target who nobody cares about. As a result, when this site talks surveillance, it is talking about such a full featured, technically supported government operation. In part this is because that is how the texts on the subject are all written, and in part it is because this type of operation poses the greatest threat. As you cut back on manpower and technical support, surveillance becomes infinitely more difficult, and operations are much easier to burn. If you know how it works with lots of people, and can harden yourself to such an operation, then you will be that much harder to surveil when there are only a few people with the low training of the criminal, which is what you will probably face in the collapse.

Now an example of a very potent surveillance detection technique.

It’s one year post collapse, and you have found a niche supplying people in your county with black market toilet paper imported from Cuba. In the post-collapse America, government has turned to seizing any wealth anyone accumulates to fund their massive surveillance state. When anyone like you isn’t hungry on a regular basis, it is a matter of time before the government catches wind of it, and launches a raid to search your property for any wealth you may have unfairly accumulated.

As a result, you suspect you’re going to be under surveillance. In reality you already are, and the government has brought a full-featured surveillance operation, but the team has done a fantastic job, and you made one crucial error that helped them.

They bought a house across the street without your knowledge, and set up a camera in the attic pointed at your driveway. They acquired a couple of houses down the street in each direction, positioned around corners and down side streets, just out of your sightlines, to stage their vehicle surveillance units from. They’ve got ears in your house courtesy of phase interference mic arrays they set on the telephone poles while you were out at the doctor’s office, and they have video cameras wired into the poles at every major decision point on the streets in your neighborhood. They are in your wifi from the pole, having used a special antenna and Aircrack to hack the password, they have your cellphone turned on 24/7, with the camera and mic transmitting 24/7 through your wifi, they opened the mic on your new TV through your Wifi, and they even did a thing with your landline phone, turning it into a microphone on your desk. When you ordered that new clock radio and that new table lamp from ebay, they even had those shipments diverted to their tech division, before it arrived at your house, so they could install a bug in it that is logging the keystrokes off your computer, and transmitting out audio.

All of their tech, from the camera in the house across the street, to the mics, to the video on the streets, to your wifi network, to your phone mics, are all being routed through broadband to a central control center, where they are monitored by two individuals. Best of all, from their perspective, they know that you don’t know that they are there. For them, everything is going according to plan. You are in the bubble, and you don’t even know.

You foolishly never got around to photographing your telephone poles, to have an image of how they looked when you were not under surveillance. As a result, now that you are expecting surveillance, you are unable to see if the wiring has been significantly altered in any way, so you haven’t noticed their tech installations. Since that opportunity has passed, and it is important to know if you have surveillance, you decide to go old-school.

You meet with a friend in his house and pass him a note, folded up. The outside says, “Take this note, and read it later.” He looks confused, but complies. When he reads the note later, it explains that you want to run a surveillance detection protocol at your house because you think you may have surveillance. It asks him to run side streets to try and lose any tail, and then rent a clean vehicle and drive by your house, wearing sunglasses and a ballcap, with the car window behind his seat rolled down. He’s to stop in the road in front of your driveway, glaring intently at your house for two to three minutes. You include $300 in the note, and give him the exact time and day to do it.

The day of the exercise, the controller monitoring video on your street sees a car turn on your street. He checks the license plate reader running on the video, and notes an unknown rental vehicle turn onto your street, heading for your house. Using surveillance brevity code, he notifies your team over their encrypted radios that a car is approaching the target residence, maybe to visit. “Unknown ant approaching Omega, possibly intending infection.” He then puts everyone on standby, moves several staged vehicle units away from the path of the incoming vehicle, and opens the static box set up on your house by having the vehicle unit setting on the path of the incoming car move quickly to a new position.

Unaware of the bustle of activity around him, your friend cruises to your house, only noting a couple of cars passing him in the opposite direction – vehicle units heading to plug a few exit points behind him in the newly expanded static box around your house. Your friend’s car stops in front of your house, and as surveillance watches on the video, all they see is a hostile guy wearing sunglasses and a ball cap glaring at your house intently, carefully scrutinizing all of it as if performing surveillance himself.

Your friend appears to be a new, competing surveillance operation doing an initial drive-by of your house. and worse, doing it recklessly. Immediately control becomes alarmed that the target will see this interloper, and begin to grow paranoid about being under surveillance. A paranoid target is much more likely to burn a surveillance team than an oblivious one. Even worse, this interloper can actually burn their entire operation just as badly as if one of their agents were detected, if they don’t deal with him quickly. They have worked so hard to keep you clueless, and now this new idiot could blow up all their hard work.

Control quickly orders one vehicle unit to chase the car off, and another to get some imagery of the driver as he does it. They need to know who this guy is. To the surveillance, this is a huge problem, and they need to get on top of it fast.

Within seconds a white minivan driven by a fat older woman with a butch haircut whips out of a side street and comes up quickly behind the interloper vehicle. As the minivan comes to a stop behind the interploer, it waits as if being held up, thereby subtly motivating the interloper to move on. A second car approaches from the opposite direction as your friend begins to move due to the “woman in a rush” behind him. The opposite driver drives over the double yellow, as if innocently drifting, but it is actually to slow his target vehicle back down. Your friend stops to avoid a head on collision, and the opposite driver then slows himself, as he swings back into his lane and passes the interloper slowly. By drifting out of his lane to slow both vehicles, he maximizes the clarity of the imagery of the driver taken by the hidden cameras in his front grill and pointing out his side window, shooting through the windshield and side window of your friend’s car.

Your friend the interloper only sees two cars which happened to drive by as he was sitting in the street, and with one trapped behind him, he picks up and moves so as to not block traffic.

Your friend, following his instructions, drives to the next driveway, pulls in, lets the car behind him pass, turns around, and repeats the procedure in the opposite direction. Again, a vehicle just innocently happens to come up behind him to move him on as another vehicle comes from the opposite direction, and again, he drives on. His work finished, he returns his rental and heads home.

Inside your house, you were monitoring your surveillance cameras at the appropriate time. You knew traffic was sparse at that time, it was why you choose it. You also know that the chance of vehicles just happening to drive up behind your drive-by-detection-car twice within seconds of each other, when no other vehicles were seen for twenty minutes on each side of the exercise means somebody has eyes on the front of your house.

The friendly drive-by is a good protocol, if you have surveillance that is still in the early phase, and it thinks it has not yet been burned. It places the team in the uncomfortable position of letting their covert surveillance, and all their hard work be blown in the most unprofessional manner possible, by an outsider who isn’t even on their team, or taking action to try and quietly move the interloper on. Most times they will choose to move the interloper along. The best part about it is, the more covert their operation, and the more they demand secrecy, the better it will work.

Now several pitfalls. If you ask your friend to do this in your house and you are under surveillance, they will probably hear it. If you are a high enough priority, and you ask a friend to do this in his house, they may hear it. They have very powerful directional mics available to them that can be capable of hearing inside houses under ideal conditions, as well as laser mics which can allow clear audio through glass windows from even greater distances. If the friend is a close enough associate, and you are a high enough priority, they may actually have interference mics on his house as well – the arrays have almost no cost, and no legal issues in their deployment – in large part because their deployment has never been litigated due to the secrecy of their deployment. If you are high enough priority, they can turn on cell phone mics, laptop mics, Onstar mics in cars, there are even mics on some TV’s that can be activated by Wifi.

If you ask him to do it in a bar, and you are under surveillance, you can bet there will be an agent right next to you recording the conversation. Do it while in a circle of friends, and one guy’s “girlfriend” may be part of a layer of stealth surveillance. In any such case, you will ruin the exercise and it will not give you a correct result. The success of this technique requires that the surveillance, if it is there, can’t know it is coming – and if it is there, they will be trying very hard and using a plethora of amazing technologies and techniques which are now standard issue to stay on top of such things. To that extent, even better than your friend would be a friend of your friend, because if you are a high priority, your friend could have full time vehicular coverage as well, since they do have a lot of operators today to keep busy.

I’d use a rental car because if they have video on your street, today that video will be wired into an automatic plate reader kicking out ID’s as the cars pass. If your friend uses his own car, it will pop as him, he will be in their system as a known associate, and the team won’t bother to push him along, since he will be a known associate. You need to create the illusion of a hostile stranger conducting surveillance on you, for some unknown reason, and you need to do it with people who are watching everything about you very closely. That is best done with an unrecognizable driver and an unknown plate.

The friendly drive-by is a more powerful technique than the more basic counter-surveillance detection route, which we will discuss later. With a CDSR, the surveillance team can easily abandon the surveillance, to avoid detection, and although they will lose some minor information, there isn’t really any positive pressure forcing them to reveal themselves, by offering a punishment if they do not expose themselves. Here, if they don’t take action and reveal themselves, they risk watching their entire operation be burned to a crisp. That is a positive pressure driving them to act.

Hopefully we will never need any of this data, but if the collapse is as bad as it appears it might be, it is impossible to say what will be important. Know surveillance, understand how it operates, cultivate your awareness, and recognize surveillance if you see it. Surveillance awareness will alert you to the most dangerous criminal attacks long before your simple situational awareness will. It may prove to be among the most vital of your survival skills.