Surveillance Detection, Why Burning is Bad

Before continuing the exploration of surveillance detection techniques, it is worth taking a moment to emphasize the reason why you should never burn your surveillance team.

“Operational” is the term surveillance uses to describe the things you are doing which are of interest to them and their surveillance operation. Operational may or may not be criminal. A spy selling secrets may buy pot on the side. That is criminal, but it is not operational to a surveillance team tasked with identifying his handler. Thus it will be cataloged, but probably ignored (unless surveillance fails to identify his handler, and the pot purchases are later used to blackmail him into turning into a double to expose the network he was supplying information to). Conversely, a dope dealer may drop off a USB stick with an encrypted message for a fellow dealer at a dead drop. That is not technically criminal to a team seeking to identify dealers, but it is operational.

Of course, if one day you fall under surveillance, the term “operational” will probably refer to the things you want to do so badly that you are risking pissing off the government to the point that you acquire surveillance coverage. Operational may be taking measures to prevent government functionaries from taking your family’s last bag of rice to give it to a welfarite crony. Or operational may be finding a way to attend the underground church services being held at a brave neighbor’s house without exposing them or yourself to governmental punishment. Operational is important to the free citizen in an oppressive society, because without operational, you begin to approach the realm of slave. Given the scale of what is approaching (and just what is already occurring), I would not rule anything out.

Because of this, one of the hard and fast rules of being a target is to not burn surveillance coverage, and never let them know that you know about them watching you. The reasons for this may not be entirely clear to the novice, but they are well understood by the professionals, and any novices stupid enough to let their surveillance catch them looking too interestedly at their coverage. The most important reason is, of course the tactical advantage that arises from being in a position to “do” things, and have them observed, cataloged, and focused upon as important by an adversary who thinks they are seeing things you don’t want them to see. Surveillance is about acquiring information. Countering surveillance is not just about not giving information – it can often also be about giving bad information.

But that is a reason for the long game, and many new targets may not be patient enough to endure the uncertainty inherent to early covert surveillance long enough to play the long game. So here we will highlight another reason to endure the irritation of uncertainty as you patiently try to determine if you have surveillance, without letting them know that you know.

A surveillance team that believes they are covert will operate covertly. Operating covertly limits their tactics, hamstrings their control, and diminishes their intelligence gathering ability, in a very real sense. Once their operation is burned, these limitations are lifted, and they can become much more aggressive in their tactics and their pursuit of you. More aggressive tactics means less opportunities for operational activity for you. That is an important short term detriment which should motivate you to be cautious in detecting your coverage, should you have any.

As an example, take vehicle coverage. Suppose a team is tailing you while you are on the move, in the course of an operation that is still in the covert mode. Because they think they have not yet been burned, they will use a floating box, where one car maintains “command,” or visual contact with the target, and the other cars all remain unseen, paralleling your route of travel on parallel streets and staying so far ahead and behind as to be out of sight.

They will use the floating box to diminish the visual exposure of the team down to one vehicle’s visual presence, rather than having several vehicles, of which your noticing any one would burn them, and which would thus greatly increase the risk of burning.

Even more restrictively, they will have to assiduously obey traffic laws to avoid exposure, and avoid performing the types of “unusual” driving maneuvers a “terrible” and “absent-minded” driver such as yourself might make – such as sudden U-turns, crossing multiple lanes of freeway traffic to take an exit, turning from the wrong lane without signaling, etc. If other assets on other operations happen to be in an area you are passing through, they will even have them clear the area, if it is feasible for their operation. Being covert actually forces them to weaken their coverage of you to avoid detection. Indeed, the very thing you find most frustrating, the uncertainty of not knowing if what you are seeing is really surveillance, may be due to the very trait of their covert operation you most want to maintain – it’s weakness in covering you.

In such a case, it is not uncommon for the command car to periodically lose command, getting trapped in traffic behind other vehicles it was using as cover as you break out of the pack and take off, or getting caught at a suddenly changing stoplight as you cruise through. You can even exacerbate this, blocking them in traffic by driving slowly, as if unsure where you are going, and building up a jam of cars behind you, before catching a light and zooming off, taking the first side street the moment you are out of sight of your command car.

With a floating box composed of a professional team coordinating over radio, you will not lose them often this way, but it can happen periodically, and once they are lost, you can again engage in operational activity, free from prying eyes.

If you openly burn your team however, they will progress to decoy/diversion coverage, or even worse, the sort of saturating phased coverage you find near metropolitan areas today. Once your team is freed from covert constraints, all 12 vehicles on a typical phase/team may quietly box you in, with cars in front of you, behind you, beside you, and leading into every possible route you might take at each intersection. Suddenly, operational activity will be almost impossible to engage in, at least until they decide to lift your coverage, which in today’s world of limitless budgets, may or may not ever happen again.

It can be tempting to burn things when you are first seeing vague indicators of surveillance, mainly because little is as irritating as the uncertainty of not knowing if the indices you have seen are really a surveillance operation in play, or if it is all paranoia in your head causing you to see ghosts. The human brain does not like such uncertainty.

But the answer to the uncertainty isn’t provoking the team to the point they clearly unmask themselves, and then sulk away in anger, their operation’s covert nature in ashes. The answer to the uncertainty is schooling yourself in the techniques used to detect surveillance, and the ways to do it subtlety, without alerting the team to your knowledge of their activities, and then having the patience to go about it slowly and methodically until you dispel all doubt.

So always keep in mind, surveillance detection isn’t about the gotcha. It is about realizing when your freedom is impinged without anyone knowing, so you can maintain the ability to periodically, “accidentally,” happen to find yourself free to do the various and sundry operational things you want. If what is coming is as bad as it appears it will be, it may be simple freedom that is operational.