I havenāt ever really talked about this before but Iād like to introduce a concept that Iām going to call āsecurity nihilism.ā
Hereās the deal: Youāre already burned.
Itās over! Thereās no going back! Your face is in a database and your DNA is in a database and your social profile is in a database and thereās nothing you can do about it. Even if you didnāt put it there somebody else did. Congrats, weāre all fucked!
Facebook builds shadow profiles on people who donāt have accounts. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Your cousin signed up for Ancestry and your brother did 23&Me.
So what can you do about it? Essentially nothing. So thereās no point in panicking.
You know what you have to do if you want some kind of privacy? Start leaving your phone at home randomly. Or at work randomly. People donāt think about the fact that their cell phoneās location data (which is constantly tracking even if you donāt enable location data for apps) is a more effective way of tracking them than anything they post online and itās *real* easy to get a warrant for that data. And if you suddenly ditch your phone for the first time in several months itās suspicious as FUCK.
Automated license plate readers track your drive. Do you commute? Do you drive the same way every day? Why the sudden change to your routine? What were you doing that you needed to park your car and wander away suddenly? What are you hiding?
Complaining about people posting selfies when companies are compiling DNA databases sharing them with the FBI is like blaming ocean pollution on people using plastic straws when about half of plastic ocean trash is abandoned fishing equipment.
Do you use gmail? Youāre fucked.
Do you have a bank account? Youāre fucked.
Do you use public transportation? Youāre fucked.
Do you go to school? Youāre fucked.
Do you have a job? Youāre fucked.
I had to track down a guy who didnāt have facebook or social media profiles, didnāt have a listing in the phonebook, didnāt have a linkedin. I started with his first and last name and ended with his supervisorās phone number, a ten year history of his income, and his home address. I got to it through his sonās little league team.
And Iām fucking J. Random Nobody. I donāt even have shiny databases full of tracking data.
So youāre already burned. Thereās no going back, we passed the tipping point. Even if you threw out your computer and shut down all your accounts and smashed your cell phone and lived in the woods thereād be video of you walking out of town for the last time and satellite images of wherever you ended up setting up camp.
I was never going to be able to hide from the cameras on the streets and the data in my cell phone and the scanners that look at the license plate of my car and the information that my school sold about my age and income and interests. So fuck it. Share a selfie.
[fyi the secret to actual opsec is to trust no one and to have no discernible patterns - being in a facial recognition database doesnāt matter if you make a point of not showing your face when youāre doing whatever youāre doing that you want to keep quiet; your goal isnāt to evade the facial recognition software as youāre on the run from the government, your goal is to never even show up on their radar]
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