Survival, Evasion, and Fieldcraft

Evasion - Successfully evading capture by hostile forces depends upon personal preparation, planning for the contingency, and to some degree, fortunate circumstances or luck. Attention to detail when preparing an emergency action plan, complete familiarity with communications devices and emergency procedures, and knowledge of personal survival kit items, indigenous personnel, and regional knowledge (flora, fauna, topography, climate, etc.) will aid in successful evasion. Isolated persons should carefully consider contact with indigenous people. Many countries have citizens overseas in areas where there is strong potential for mixed attitudes towards foreigners. There may be a high-risk of indigenous persons responding negatively or even violently, and your presence may result in personal danger to them regardless of their sympathies. Areas controlled by insurgents and illegally armed groups or criminals, locations of mob activity, roads, railroads, trails, rivers, border crossings, and heavily populated areas are normally considered high-threat evasion environments. Individuals must take great care to prevent exposure or capture. As a first move, isolated persons should attempt to establish contact with friendly forces, break visual contact with hostile elements, and move to a secure hiding site. If in a damaged vehicle, move away for as long and as far as possible. If forced to abandon the vehicle, the isolated person should move fast and change directions frequently. When possible, the isolated person should evaluate the immediate situation and again establish communication with friendly forces. Only after careful consideration of their situation should they attempt to evade to an area to initiate recovery. Isolated persons should treat all travel as evasion.

How to Prepare for Evasion:

• Follow all local force protection guidance to avoid hazardous situations.
• Develop a plan to communicate, flee, and fight, if necessary. Holding out for a short span of time may make the difference in being taken prisoner or not.
• Develop a plan of action with several backup plans before departing a secure area.
• Be familiar with your route and map --study it in detail.
• Ensure vehicles are reliable and have all necessary emergency equipment.
• Study the local norms and be alert to situations and changes in behaviors of the locals that may signal that something bad is about to happen --clear the area.
• Have a "grab and go" kit. It should include a communications device (cell phone or radio), water, basic first aid kit, etc. Consider including local clothing to assist in any necessary improvised disguise. A weapon with extra ammunition may be appropriate if local conditions permit lawful possession.
• Have personal affairs in order, and prepare family members for the potential of isolation.
• Develop the will to survive and resist. Mental preparation is invaluable, and demonstrating a strong will can help overcome seemingly overwhelming obstacles.

When you become isolated or separated in a hostile area, either as an individual or as a group, your evasion and survival skills will determine whether or not you return to friendly lines.

• When unable to continue the mission or unable to rejoin your unit, leave the immediate area, and move to your last rally point.
• Observe activity in the area and form a plan.
• Traveling alone offers the least possibility of detection, but traveling in groups of two to three is more desirable.
• Plan a primary and alternate route. Consider distance, cover, food, and water. The easiest and shortest route may not be the best.
• Food and water are daily requirements. You can do without food for several days; water, however, is essential.
• Move at night. Use the daylight to observe, plan, and rest in a hide site.

 

Hide Site. Should be an isolated, covered and concealed site selected during evasion. In the hide site, you should take inventory of your situation and accomplish tasks such as camouflage, resting, and planning the next movement. It is seldom used or occupied for more than 24 hrs.

 

When selecting a site consider the following:

• Distance from natural lines of drift (water, roads and trails, ridges, and key terrain)
• Vegetation-thick?
• Concealed from all directions?
• Away from populated or built up areas
• Escape route
• Location where humans do not normally habitat

 

Hole Up Area. This is an isolated area selected during movement. Use it when your physical condition requires that you stop for food, water, equipment maintenance, and rest. Generally, avoid occupying such a position for more than 72 hrs. When selecting a hole up area, consider-

• Abundance of food and water
• Isolated
• Low population density
• Security at all times
• Movement in or around hole up area is still kept to a minimum
• Decentralize-separate rest, food procurement, food preparation and so on.

Survival - With training, equipment, and the will to survive, you can overcome any obstacle you may face. You will survive. Understand the emotional states associated with survival. "Knowing thyself" is extremely important in a survival situation. It bears directly on how well you cope with serious stresses, anxiety, pain, injury, illness; cold, heat, thirst, hunger, fatigue, sleep deprivation, boredom, loneliness and isolation. You can overcome and reduce the shock of being isolated behind enemy lines if you keep the key word S-U-R-V-I-V-A-L foremost in your mind. Its letters can help guide you in your actions.

S - Size up the situation, the surroundings, your physical condition, and your equipment.
U - Undue haste makes waste; don’t be too eager to move. Plan your moves.
R - Remember where you are relative to friendly and enemy units and controlled areas; water sources (most important in the desert); and good cover and concealment. This information will help you make intelligent decisions.
V - Vanquish fear and panic.
I - Improvise/Imagine. You can improve your situation. Learn to adapt what is available for different uses. Use your imagination.
V - Value living. Remember your goal to get out alive. Remain stubborn. Refuse to give in to problems and obstacles. This will give you the mental and physical strength to endure.
A - Act like the natives; watch their daily routines and determine when, where, and how they get their food and water.
L - Live by your wits. Learn basic skills.

Camouflage. While evading, you may need to use field-expedient means to camouflage yourself, your equipment, and your site. Mud, charcoal, berries, vegetation, ash and blood can all be used to camouflage exposed skin and equipment. Natural vegetation can be fixed to clothing and equipment by using vines to secure it or cutting small holes in the rip stop uniform material and feeding vegetation into it. Whenever a site is constructed and camouflaged keep the following memory aid in mind. B L I S S

Blends In

Low Silhouette

Irregular Shape

Small Size

Secluded

 

 

Data Detox

Mozilla and the Tactical Technology Collective present the 8-Day Data Detox. This program can help you clean up your digital presence and be a little bit safer on-line.

Why detox?

Do you feel like your digital self is slipping out of control?

Have you let yourself install too many apps, clicked “I agree” a few too many times, lost track of how many accounts you’ve created? Perhaps you’re not as in-control of your digital life as you’d like to be.

Don’t despair; this data detox is for you. By the end of the next 8 days, you’ll be well on your way to a healthier and more in-control digital self!
Toxic data build-up

If we think about what one or two pieces of data tell others about us, it may not seem that big of a deal: who cares if I’m a fan of country music, have a nerdy passion for trains, or harbor a secret crush on Sam in Accounts?

The problem lies in what’s happening with all of these pieces of data: collected across all our devices, services and accounts, and analyzed, shared and sold. Taken together over time, intimate digital patterns emerge: our habits, movements, relationships, preferences, beliefs and secrets are revealed to those who collect and capitalize on them.

As you follow this data detox, you’ll get a glimpse into how and why this is all happening, and take practical steps to reduce your “data bloat” – a toxic build-up of data that can lead to uncomfortable consequences in the longer term.

So... check out the 8-Day Data Detox

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech

Politico (June 3, 2018) published an excerpt from Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech, by Cyrus Farivar.

The police in Santa Clara, CA tracked a hacker through the warrantless use of a secretive surveillance technology known as a stingray, which snoops on cell phones. Stingrays, or cell-site simulators, act as false cell phone towers that trick phones into giving up their location. They have become yet another tool in many agencies’ toolbox, and their use has expanded with little oversight - and no public knowledge that they were even being used until the Hacker went on an obsessive quest to find out just how law enforcement tracked him. When he tugged on that thread, he found out something else: that police might be tracking a lot more than we even know on our phones, often without the warrants that are usually needed for comparable methods of invasive surveillance.

While StingRay is a trademark, stingray has since become so ubiquitous in law enforcement and national security circles as to also often act as the catch-all generic term - like Kleenex or Xerox. A stingray acts as a fake cell tower and forces cell phones and other mobile devices using a cell network (like Rigmaiden’s AirCard, which provided his laptop with Internet access) to communicate with it rather than with a bona fide mobile network. Stingrays are big boxes - roughly the size of a laser printer - like something out of a 1950s-era switchboard, with all kinds of knobs and dials and readouts. Stingrays can easily be hidden inside a police surveillance van or another nearby location.

All of our cell phones rely on a network of towers and antennas that relay our signal back to the network and then connect us to the person that we’re communicating with. As we move across a city, mobile networks seamlessly hand off our call from one tower to the next, usually providing an uninterrupted call. But in order for the system to work, the mobile phone provider needs to know where the phone actually is so that it can direct a signal to it. It does so by sending a short message to the phone nearly constantly—in industry terminology this is known as a ping. The message basically is asking the phone: “Are you there?” And your phone responds: “Yes, I’m here.” (Think of it as roughly the mobile phone version of the children’s swimming pool game Marco Polo.) If your phone cannot receive a ping, it cannot receive service. The bottom line is, if your phone can receive service, then the mobile provider (and possibly the cops, too) know where you are. (Politico June 3, 2018)

Credit Freezes Will Be Free for Everyone in Washington Starting June 6, 2018

Starting June 6, 2018, credit bureaus will be prohibited from charging you – or anyone else who lives in Washington – to freeze or unfreeze your credit file.

Until now, most state residents have been charged $10 to freeze their file at each of the big three credit bureaus – Equifax, Experian and TransUnion – and another $10 to thaw the account to apply for credit. There’s another $10 charge to refreeze the file.

A new state law that takes effect on June 6 requires both freezes and thaws to be free.

A security freeze does not impact your credit score and it does not affect any relationship you already have with a creditor. It will help prevent crooks from getting a credit card or taking out a loan in your name.

“When you freeze your credit file, no one – including you – can gain access that file, unless it’s been thawed by you using a special PIN or passcode.”

“Credit monitoring will only warn you after a problem has occurred, as opposed to a credit freeze which is designed to prevent a problem from occurring in the first place.”

A freeze isn’t a silver bullet. It won’t stop all forms of identity theft, but it is one of the few things you can do to fight back. And now you can do it for free.

ProtonMail and Tutanota

ProtonMail has a good explanation of zero-access encryption on its blog. All e-mail stored on ProtonMail servers is encrypted. Thus, even if the server is hacked or ProtonMail is faced with a government demand for your data the only thing available on the ProtonMail server would be encrypted data. ProtonMail is headquartered in Switzerland, and its servers are located there as well. This means that a government request for your data would have to be made through the Swiss courts and comply with Swiss data privacy laws.

Tutnota discusses how its encryption protects your personal information on the Tutanota servers. With Tutanota The entire mailbox is end-to-end encrypted. The encrypted data can only be accessed by your company. This includes all emails and all contact information (address book) stored in Tutanota. All data is stored encrypted on our own servers in highly secured data centers located in Germany.

I use both ProtonMail & Tutanota and recommend them as excellent services to secure your personal and private communications.

Don't Be A Twit - Encrypt Your Shit !

In June 2017 (updated in November 2017) Medium published a comparison of Tutanota vs. ProtonMail.

ProtonMail - https://protonmail.com     Tutanota - https://tutanota.com   

Most Secure E-mail Services

A May 20, 2018 article on Make Tech Easier introduces 10 of the most secure e-mail services for better privacy. As the article says:

"You can’t have too much privacy in today’s all-seeing Internet of big corporations, nosey governments, and “14 Eyes.” (If you don’t know what that is, do your research!) You don’t need to be a criminal not to want your emails spied on, but to have a guarantee of that, you’ll need to find an email service with your privacy as its main concern."

Of the ten e-mail services:

1. Disroot
2. TorGuard
3. Hushmail
4. Runbox
5. Mailfence
6. ProtonMail
7. Tutanota
8. Posteo.de
9. Kolab Now
10. CounterMail

I personally like ProtonMail and Tutanota. I previously used Hushmail, but haven't done so in several years, and no-longer recommend them since they compromised their users e-mail accounts back in 2007.

E-mail is most secure with the above services when it remains on the provider's network (i.e. ProtonMail to ProtonMail), but in all cases you should look for an e-mail service that provides encryption both for messages in transit and while at rest on the e-mail provider's servers.

Little Brother and Homeland

 

Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. 

 



Little Brother

Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works - and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.


Homeland

In Cory Doctorow's wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco―an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.

A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus's hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumb drive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It's incendiary stuff―and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.

Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him―but he can't admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He's surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can't even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He's not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he's gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they're used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want.

Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother―a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.
--

Cory Doctorow's fiction novel Little Brother, and its follow-on Homeland are entertaining for those who enjoy fiction, and yet these fiction novels provide information on personal security and digital privacy while fighting back against government overreach and oppression.