I havenât ever really talked about this before but Iâd like to introduce a concept that Iâm going to call âsecurity nihilism.â
Hereâs the deal: Youâre already burned.
Itâs over! Thereâs 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 thereâs nothing you can do about it. Even if you didnât put it there somebody else did. Congrats, weâre all fucked!
Facebook builds shadow profiles on people who donât 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 thereâs 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 donât think about the fact that their cell phoneâs location data (which is constantly tracking even if you donât enable location data for apps) is a more effective way of tracking them than anything they post online and itâs *real* easy to get a warrant for that data. And if you suddenly ditch your phone for the first time in several months itâs 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? Youâre fucked.
Do you have a bank account? Youâre fucked.
Do you use public transportation? Youâre fucked.
Do you go to school? Youâre fucked.
Do you have a job? Youâre fucked.
I had to track down a guy who didnât have facebook or social media profiles, didnât have a listing in the phonebook, didnât have a linkedin. I started with his first and last name and ended with his supervisorâs phone number, a ten year history of his income, and his home address. I got to it through his sonâs little league team.
And Iâm fucking J. Random Nobody. I donât even have shiny databases full of tracking data.
So youâre already burned. Thereâs 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 thereâd 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 doesnât matter if you make a point of not showing your face when youâre doing whatever youâre doing that you want to keep quiet; your goal isnât to evade the facial recognition software as youâre on the run from the government, your goal is to never even show up on their radar]
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