Surveillance Awareness and Boating the Bahamas

I was reading this page of the Bumfuzzle blog. It is a blog detailing the worldly travels of a couple, in this case, their meandering travels through the Bahamas on a sailboat.

In one passage, the guy writing it says,

february 22 2004 : lee stocking island, exumas, bahamas

Another beautiful day today. We motored down to Lee Stocking Island in the afternoon. There was just a whisper of wind, so no sailing again. Upon arriving, we found a nice little place to anchor all by ourselves. A couple of hours later the sheep started coming in. I don’t think we’ll ever quite understand some cruisers. I understand sometimes there is only a little area that is suitable for anchoring. But then there are days like today when you could anchor anywhere along this two mile stretch of island. All of it equally good. Instead of finding their own slice of beach, they feel the need to congregate like a flock of sheep.

The first boat came in and anchored just off to our side. Then another boat came in and anchored directly behind us. As if that’s not annoying enough, a while later I look over at one of them and see they’re staring at us through binoculars. Weirdos.

Now most people aren’t surveillance aware. In our culture, we are taught that surveillance awareness (along with threat awareness in general) is paranoia, and paranoia is somehow a sign of mental defectiveness, and thus it should never be exhibited. In reality, paranoia only becomes problematic when you ascribe certainty to a conclusion that is based on an observation that cannot be conclusively resolved with certainty. Here, surveillance awareness would dictate that one view binocular boy as a weak indicator of surveillance, who was seen in conjunction with other weak indicators.

When Bumfuzzle’s captain arrived at the mooring point, nobody was there. Shortly after his arrival at this empty harbor, a group suddenly floats in. This is a pattern spies are taught to look out for, and that is often employed purposely in surveillance detection. If you imagine a place that is mostly empty, all the time, except for a minute a day, and you arrive at it at random times, it is likely that conditions when you arrive will be representative of how it usually looks – that is, it will be empty. Thus if you arrive at a place, and it is barren of people, then you can be forgiven for assuming it is usually pretty empty. If you assume it is usually empty, and suddenly a crowd shows up right after you arrive, you need to ask yourself if that crowd might have arrived right after you for a reason. Like most surveillance detection, it is far from dispositive, but it is a weak trigger which will make the surveillance conscious individual pause and think twice.

This is also one way a surveillance-conscious person such as a spy organizes their activities to expose surveillance. Beginning before surveillance becomes operative, such an individual will begin looking for out of the way stores to shop at, where foot traffic is as low as possible. Ideally, the target would organize his schedule so that he would arrive at these stores to shop when they would be empty. If selected properly (such that the stores are not unduly out of the target’s way) then to the surveillance team, these will just appear to be stores the target frequents.

When professional surveillance first picks up the target and begins the follow, they will unwittingly send foot surveillance in after him at every stop, as a part of their procedure. If the target has properly acclimated to his surroundings, such foot traffic will seem surprisingly obvious when it begins, given that the stores on the target’s route were previously always empty, but now suddenly each store always has one or two people arrive immediately after the target. That set of circumstances can cause an extremely professional surveillance operation, perfectly melded into the background noise of a target’s life, to suddenly stand out like a sore thumb.

Note that among professional surveillance teams, foot surveillance always accompanies vehicle surveillance, which is always accompanied by some form of technical surveillance – the foot and vehicle units are enmeshed together with the mobile tech as one functional machine. No surveillance report produced by a professional team will ever state, “Target Tony Abondando left his driveway at 11:37 AM. He proceeded South down Abbot Ave, stopped at the stoplight at Abbot Ave and Smith St., turned East on Smith St., then turned north into the parking lot of 117 Smith St., the address of Pantolianio’s Italian Restaurant. He parked behind the restaurant, walked around the front, and entered the front door at 11:49 AM. We have no idea what he did or who he met in there. He exited the store at 11:51, and proceeded to return home.” The surveillance team handler would never accept that in this day and age. Today they will have photos and video of his whole trip, maybe even audio inside his car at points, and stills grabbed off hidden video taken of him in the restaurant, by the morbidly obese fat lady and the limping elderly man they sent in after him with hidden 1080p body cameras to document everything he did inside.

Was what this boater saw surveillance? It is impossible to say with any certainty, but I would have been suspicious. Especially since in the next post he reveals that they had just unwittingly forgotten to get an extension of their visa from the Bahamian immigration office, meaning they had technically begun an illegal stay in the country that very day. I’d imagine that popped on somebody’s computer. If DEA is monitoring boat traffic down there, that is probably a good way to go about getting attention.

The Bahamas are actually blanketed in US government surveillance, as part of the war on drugs. The NSA made noise recently when it was revealed that they piggybacked their own free access to Bahamian cellphone traffic in on the back of the DEA, who had been legitimately invited in to monitor cell traffic by the Bahamian government. They are actually archiving all calls in a searchable database complete with triangulated location. They are not rolling that extensive a penetration of their tech in, without adding in-person surveillance, from trained operators to on-the-payroll “liaisons,” or civilian informants throughout the islands.

Add to that, there is an attitude that naturally arises when a citizen is off the grid, and away from civilization. You are keenly aware of the threat to yourself should you run into trouble. There is no 911 to call, nobody who will come and save you. That heightens your threat awareness, because if you should make one mistake and fail to spot a threat, you might not get a second chance to save yourself. It is very primal. Once you feel that, you become aware that others will feel it as well, and you will act in such a manner as to avoid triggering their threat perception machinery. I would never have showed up with a friend, and surrounded a stranger’s boat, in an isolated area. Having done that, I would never have then invaded the stranger’s privacy by glaring at them through binoculars.

From my readings on surveillance procedures, I would have wondered if the following scenario took place.

A few days prior, an analyst pulled satellite photos of the Bahamas, and began examining the sectors he was responsible for monitoring each day. He noticed a lone sailboat in an isolated, rarely used harbor, staying away from other cruisers. He immediately began pulling sat photos from previous days, tracking the boat back, and noticing it was staying away from other boats, and tending to moor alone, in areas away from the touristy places. He may have checked the registered owner for PADI (SCUBA) certification, and seen none. He checked their immigration paperwork, and noted that their visa was about to run out in a day, meaning they would be in the middle of the country illegally.

He passed this curious flag on to an investigator, who reached out to a network of agents drifting on tech-laden covert surveillance sailboats in various harbors, under cover of cruising. A few reported back after reviewing their video that they had recorded the boat, and it fit the profile of a courier boat – it appeared to be a pleasure sailboat that was occupied by a single couple (to maximize profit from the run compared to two couples, but soften their profile by appearing as a couple), it moved south from isolated harbor to isolated harbor quickly, and the couple hadn’t been overly social with anyone. They may have done a quick background check, finding the registered owner had come from a major city known for drug activity, and had inexplicably left his job on short notice to buy a boat and take off into the Bahamas. He even had relatives fly in from Chicago, and meet him on the boat, bringing in four checked suitcases, but leaving with only two – leaving two on the boat, full of Christmas “presents.”

That made the agent wonder, why had they suddenly left their cushy lives? Did they meet a guy who offered them a job cruising south through the Bahamas, couriering money back into Central America for a cartel? (If you read on, you will see they told everyone they met they were heading directly for Panama, where when they arrived a nice guy hanging out outside the immigration office took them around to help them with all their immigration paperwork) Did the relative fly in with packages for them to transfer south? At that point, the investigator would have deployed some of the DEA’s cruising surveillance fleet to check them out.

If that was what happened, then I would assume DEA would have fielded the same tech they use domestically for vehicle surveillance on the boats. When the boats came up, they took up 90 degree positions around the target offering the ideal sightlines for their tech. Inside their boats, high-frame-rate megapixel cameras would begin filming the sightlines, primarily to get photos of the occupants, and establish who was on board. I’m sure some form of microphones would have been deployed, offering some measure of insight into the conversations they were having on board. They probably compared the photos of the occupants to their passport photos, to confirm they were still the people who were sailing the boat in Florida.

Now a word on surveillance procedures. All of that might seem like a lot of effort for a young couple. There are a few reasons for that. First, surveillance has been doing its thing for a long time, so they have had to develop aggressive tactics to deploy on their professional adversaries, some of who may be very highly trained themselves. They also know they can be assigned a big job, against a hard target, on a moment’s notice. If a big job is assigned, they will need to be ready to perform aggressively. It can’t be the first time they went all out.

For that reason, surveillance will deploy as hard against a young couple who have probably done nothing, as they will against a meeting of spies hired by terrorists and drug kingpins, looking to discuss smuggling a nuke into America. That young couple is an opportunity to test out the new underwater wave-phase interference mics they just mounted on all their boats and linked together over Wifi, that can hear clearly in another boat from fifty feet away using positionally targeted hull vibrations in the water. It is a chance for the guys onboard to practice their craft, and learn how easy it is to get burned, even by amateurs, if they let their guard down for a moment. It is also a chance for the team leader to see who can actually perform their art and remain unseen (and who should remain on the covert team), and who will be caught doing something obvious that will blow an operation (and should be sent to a decoy team). For them, every operation is done all out, as if the fate of America depended on it.

It seems strange a professional surveillance guy would allow himself to get caught looking through binoculars if that is what happened, but that does happen. Another possibility would be they had already established remote ears inside, and that was a provocation, to see whether the guy would run into the boat and say to his girl, “Hey look at this weirdo looking at us!,” (the right answer) or if he would say, “Holy shit! I think it’s the DEA! I think they know!” (the wrong answer). Given he probably said the first, if it was DEA, they let him move on.

If so, it would not surprise me if they radio’d ahead to their surveillance/liaison officers in the next harbor, and told them to make contact, and feel him out to be sure. If you go to the next page in the blog, you will note that he suddenly made easy friends with a bunch of people in the next harbor who kept inviting him out to social gatherings, and he even commented on how different this was from the rest of his time in the Bahamas, where everyone kept to themselves. They even just all showed up to his boat, and came aboard to hang out, unannounced at one point.

Personally, if I saw this situation with binocular-boy in the Bahamas, I’d file away the three possibilities – a weirdo/aspie who had no compunction about invading the privacy of a stranger he just happened upon in an isolated area (most likely), a poorly conducted pre-raid surveillance of a potential target by a criminal (unlikely, but possible), or a DEA op checking to see if I was couriering (unlikely, but maybe more likely than the criminal option given our expanding surveillance state). There is no way to know conclusively that any particular possibility is impossible, so you would have to keep all three in the forefront of your mind simultaneously. That is surveillance awareness, and it is also the most complete picture of your surrounding environment that you can maintain.

Of those three possibilities, I would assume the first and the last were the overwhelmingly likely causes, and thus the threat would have been low. However, given that when you are on your own there are no second chances, I would have spent no time pulling up anchor, and getting out of there, making sure to not say anything inside the boat that might provoke further DEA suspicion should it be them, like, “Hmmmn. This might be surveillance. I’d better leave..” A big rule in surveillance awareness, is never let anybody know you are surveillance aware, or they will wonder why.

Of course, once the collapse hits, I would be considerably more prone to increase the prominence of option number two in my mind, and take appropriate security measures should that surveillance be the first step in a planned attack.