It is post-collapse and you are rolling in the lead car in a four car convoy from your neighborhood to a barter site to do a deal. You notice a car that turns onto the road ahead of you, just as you approach that intersection. There is something about the way it moves – seemingly slowly after turning on, until you get up on it, and then it accelerates quickly to your speed, seemingly pacing you from a set distance in front. You wonder if it might be vehicular surveillance, even the lead car in a “floating box” around you, the other cars paralleling you out of sight on side streets and following out of sight behind you on the command car’s directions. You wonder if your barter site has somehow been compromised, or if you are walking into an ambush to steal your goods. In the post-collapse world, rip-offs are an everyday occurrence. How can you tell if the car is surveillance?
Vehicle surveillance has certain procedures they must follow for safety. One procedure is, if you are a single vehicle in command of a multi-vehicular target (such as using a “cheating command” of the target convoy (driving in front of them)), you must try to never let the target surround you. The whole of the target should remain in one focused point in relation to you, and you should have an escape route away from them in your mind at all times.
This is a safety issue mainly, since in matters of safety you have to assume you are burned, and about to be attacked, both for your own safety and the security of the mission. Here, you avoid being surrounded because if you are burned, you want to avoid being controlled by the target forcefully (such as being boxed in on multiple sides and forced to stop for an abduction). Since what you are doing is technically espionage, it would not be an unprecedented response for a target who made you, to pretend they didn’t make you right up until they scoop you up quickly and spirit you away for an impromptu interrogation. That is not only bad for you. If they get you to an isolated location away from your backup and begin torture, there is no telling what you might give up. Communication frequencies, encryption codes, operational base, leadership, mission, intelligence sources. The whole operation could be compromised.
You also do not want to be unable to watch all of the target easily and casually. If individuals are on both sides of you, it would be easy for the targets behind you to pull out a gun and execute you while you look at the targets on the other side. If your head is snapping around due to such a fear, you are also more likely to be burned by the target. So for purposes of safety, tailing a convoy is much like fighting multiple opponents. You do not want to find yourself in the center of the group.
In the example above, you radio to the second car in your convoy to perform a test, using a prearranged brevity code so if anybody is into your communications, they will not see what is coming. The second car drops back, builds up speed, and then passes both you and the car in front of you, basically boxing the suspect vehicle in between both of you. The boxing in is done in a slightly aggressive way, that would make a normal vehicle say, “What the hell is this idiot doing?” A surveillance vehicle targeting you however, seeing that slight aggression, would panic, assume they were burned, and think this was the beginning of something bad.
Once boxed in, the car, driven by a surveillance pro, takes the next turnoff quickly without braking, and is gone. As it leaves, your tailing car radios that another car has just come up behind your convoy, and is pacing you from a set distance behind. That could be the tailing car in your floating box assuming command from the lead car. If you are under surveillance, then as that occurs, the car paralleling you on the side the former command car turned onto is probably racing, to get ahead of you and take a lead position ahead, out of sight, as your former command car assumes his new position paralleling you out of sight on the next road over, at least until he can swap into a new car or be relieved by another unit.
Like most surveillance detection techniques the result is not dispositive. It is possible the car had innocently turned on ahead of you and been planning to take that turnoff all along. However this is the best you can hope for when inhabiting the hall of mirrors you enter when surrounded by well-trained people trying to deceive you. You predicted that if you surrounded the vehicle it would turn off at the next turnoff, you surrounded it, and it turned off. That it didn’t brake should only add to your suspicions.
The technique can be done a number of ways, from having a scout car up ahead slow down to box in the command car from the front, to having your tailing car peel off and speed parallel to you while your lead car slows down, slowing the command car, until your tailing car jumps in ahead of him. In a parking lot you can arrange cars such that it looks as if you are trying to block exit points, and trap them in place.
The key is to create something threatening to a surveillance pro who knows that he is targeting you and has safety procedures he was taught, but which an innocent vehicle unaware of you would either not notice or ignore. It will work best with a small team covering you, and multiple cars on your side for obvious reasons. If you have five surveillance cars that are all around you on a highway and you are alone, it will be much more difficult to execute this technique.
You see why surveillance is fascinating. It is its own world of rules and contingencies, and like any well developed science, some of it can turn into a quite clever chess match of subtle head games between target and surveillance, each trying to make the other act and reveal their secrets.
Hopefully, the collapse will not be that bad, and fascinating will be all that surveillance remains. But if things do get extremely dangerous, you should know something about it. Surveillance is the first stage in attack planning, and surveillance detection is the most important skill in maintaining your situational awareness of the types of dangerous enemies who pose the greatest threat to your survival. The way the world is going, one day, your life could depend upon your knowledge of this field.
[…] Surveillance Detection – The Vehicular Box-in […]
Are you kidding? Nobody’ll be driving anywhere after a collapse. There won’t be any available fuel.
Bicycles only.
Anonymous Conservative,
Have you given any thought to why type of vehicle would be best to have during the coming times? Is performance more important or is size more important?
I’m a big car nut, so I’m curious to hear what you have to think on this.
Best Regards,
AR10308
Off roading is a big advantage, if you have a small, unprofessional surveillance team with follow cars that can’t go off road, and can plan your route accordingly. Plus, as the poster above points out, roads may not get maintained, so potholes could be an issue. Size, power, and weight is always good for ramming, which is a huge requirement if you are planning for any lawlessness around you that needs to be evaded.
Professional surveillance actually fields teams with different car types, to cover every contingency. Some are sports for if the target gets away fast or handling is required to keep up, some are off roaders for if the target goes off-road, some are vans loaded with tech and often mini-mobile command centers, others are good for carrying and quickly off loading foot operators (they often use taxis, or at least, cars painted like taxis). Other cars are suited to being static observation posts, by having silhouettes designed to not look out of place just sitting in a position all day (a phone company van sitting under a telephone pole, for example).
It really depends on what you see coming, where you’ll be operating, and whether you plan to be on the offense in the chaos, or playing defense and evading. If you are going to be shooting, a pick-up with guys laid out flat under tarps until they pop up to start shooting can be better than a sports car, but if you want to move quickly in a city to avoid trouble (or the law) a small fast vehicle, even a sport bike sometimes, could be better than an SUV.
Loosing surveillance, if they are professional and bring off roading capability, specifically benefits from acceleration since it is often done either by tying them up in traffic and then catching them in the traffic at lights as you speed away, or on side streets in neighborhoods with lots of ingress and egress, where quick turns and acceleration help you speed though the streets to break out on the other side and into another neighborhood before they circle around to control all the ingress and egress to the old neighborhood.
I personally would prefer the high sightline and off road capability of an SUV myself for a general purpose vehicle, but I’d go with a Durango, or something similar to maximize acceleration. Surveillance teaches always four doors so you can offload everyone at once if need be. Beyond that, I am not that extensively trained with cars, so I’m sure you’d see something I wouldn’t.
That said, newer cars are likely subject to hacking. I plan on looking into what it would take to run a very low power spark gap generator at the antenna to prevent any hacking of the vehicle, as well as inhibit remote GPS/audio monitoring if possible, with a flip of a switch (but low enough power to not wipe out anything beyond a few feet away from the car). Of greater legality would be going with an older, less electronically sophisticated vehicle, but you will sacrifice performance. Again, the importance of the hacking threat probably depends how thick your “troublesome little prick” file is with the powers that be. I’m planning for a file on the thicker side. You may not need to worry so much. Or you might.
One problem with all these Mad Max scenarios is that roads require constant upkeep. In the absence of a functioning government (which many parts of America barely have now), travel in excess of 15 mph soon becomes impossible.
Africans have found an elegant solution to the rip-off problem: A stronger tribe visits a weaker tribe and pays them in advance for goods they haven’t produced yet. When the strong tribe returns later to collect their order, there’s nothing to steal but the goods they’ve already paid for.