The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance

No matter how much you have limited the location monitoring in applications and operating systems, your smartphone can also be followed via your cellular service, as your device breaks around you to stay connected to the network. This is why the easiest way to be sure that your devices do not collect or do not disclose where you do not wear them. If you do not create data in the first place, no one can access it.

“If you try not to be followed, not having a phone is often the easiest,” says Sandvik. “Leave it home.”

For most people most of the time, this solution is not practical. You can put your devices in plane mode or deactivate them completely to limit connectivity. But to be completely certain that everything is out of the grid, you can put your devices in special sachets or cases known as Faraday bags which block all the electromagnetic signals that come or come from a device. The Faraday bags allow you to transport your devices while preventing them from exposing your location; For example, by hiding your spell one afternoon given or on the route you have taken to get to a destination. The drawback of Faraday bags is that the device must stay in the bag to protect your privacy, so you have to plan to use them effectively. Deleting your phone means that the cat (location) has come out of the bag.

Financial privacy

Financial surveillance is among the most powerful monitoring tools in the government’s arsenal. Payments by credit card or other transactions related to your bank account are essentially transparent to any law enforcement agency that requires them.

This form of surveillance “Following money” also has a relatively simple analog defense: a dollar tickets. “Medico-legal accounting is one thing,” warns Holmes. “So yes, use money.”

For those looking for more practical or long -distance transactions, payment applications such as Paypal, VEVMO and Cash App may seem slightly more in cash than a credit card or a check, but in fact are just as vulnerable to requests for law application data as any bank. Cryptocurrency may seem to be a tempting alternative. But despite the long term Mythical reputation of anonymous silver cryptocurrency for internetBitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies offer no real confidentiality, given the ease of tracing Bitcoin transactions on his blockchain and the difficulty of buying or selling cryptocurrencies from an exchange of cryptocurrency which complies with American laws to the customer.

Some cryptocurrencies like Monero and ZCASH offer privacy properties that make them much more difficult to trace than other cryptocurrencies-at least in theory. The services of mixers like the Tornado Cash based in Ethereum also promise to mix user parts with those of others to complicate the task of following the money. However, given the progress in progress in tracing cryptocurrencies – and the indelible evidence of any security exchange that public blockchains provide cats in this cat and mouse game – it is much safer to stick to money whenever possible.

A note on burners phones

Brusters, or prepaid phones that are not connected to any of your credit cards or digital accounts, can be a useful tool to protect your location data and other information. They are supposed to have no traceable connection with you and be used for a limited time. In other words, they are supposed to provide anonymity.

The advantage of using burner devices is that you don’t have to worry about personal information as it collects or inadvertently flee while you use it because the devices are not linked to you. They just show that someone goes here and there or that someone has, for example, plan to meet someone else at 8 p.m. on the benches of the park. Over time, however, if you use the device to communicate often, connect to all the digital accounts associated with you from the device, give a burner number to people who do not use burners themselves, or bring it to a location associated with you while it is on, like your home, the phone could quickly be linked to you.