American Blog

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

For now, it’s not illegal for Brits to do a number of very simple things to avoid Big Brother scrutiny. For now.

They can bury messages to friends in forwarded newspaper articles. They can wear hoodies in most city streets and shopping malls to avoid having their faces scanned, ‘mapped’ and stored in databases. They can live ‘off the grid’. They can barter for food. They can use basic, legal technology to hide their vehicle’s number plates from ‘time and place’ registering spy cameras.

Of course, that may all change within a year or two. In the past year alone, British schoolchildren as young as five years old began getting fingerprint scans at school, and some parents have been shocked to learn their infants’ DNA has been registered on a national database. Surveillance cameras in British cities now shout instructions to passers-by, while others record and analyse supposedly ’suspicious behaviour’ in people simply walking to work.

The onslaught of Philip K Dickian ultra-surveillance in the UK has come fast and thick, a cloying torrent of high-tech police state measures that many Brits seem to have no problem accepting as a necessary part of life today. They’ve bought into the spin, and now believe ultra-surveillance provides ultra-security.

But not every Brit believes this, and not every Brit is willing to submit.

Nick Rosen, of the UK Observer, supplies a Top Ten of ways to outwit Big Brother (excerpts) :

1 Buy an untraceable mobile phone

2 Safeguard your email

You do not need an email address of your own. One hacker I spoke to sends emails from cybercafes via The Observer website, using the service which allows anyone to send any article to a friend. He embeds his message into the covering note which goes with the article.

3 Safeguard your computer and your files

There is sophisticated software that deletes all traces of your activities from your computer. Assuming you don’t have access to this, it is still worth remembering the data about you contained inside each file.

4 Be invisible to CCTV cameras

Steve is a middle-aged IT consultant who lives in a bungalow on a smart private estate in south west London. He has never committed a criminal act. When he goes to business meetings, he wears a suit and tie, but when he walks around his local high street, he dons a hoodie. He does it on principle.

5 Stay off spam mailing lists

6 Prevent supermarkets knowing your shopping habits

(Ed note : dump your store cards. They may give you ten dollars or so credit for every grand you spend, but that store card supplies them with invaluable information on your shopping habits, as well as logging where you shop and how much you spend)

7 Avoid utility companies’ marketing departments

Live off-grid, unplugged from the system with solar panels and rainwater harvesting.

8 Keep your car off the automatic number recognition system

The simplest way is to leave the car at home and use a bicycle. But if you must drive…swap the light above the rear numberplate for an infrared bulb and that will flood the video-camera which operates at near infrared frequency.

9 Safeguard your NHS data

10 Shop outside the system

Another way to avoid buying food is to barter for it. The car park of the pub in the centre of Longframlington village in Northumberland has been a barter centre for decades. On any Friday night between April and October, locals arrive and flip down the backs of their 4×4s laden with the week’s produce, whether its chanterelles, venison, pheasant, line-caught salmon or the latest crop of beetroots and lettuces.

Final note from Rosen :

It may seem almost comical to go to these lengths, but the ways companies and the public sector can misuse data isn’t a joke. We cannot trust them to safeguard our data or use it ethically, so we must provide our own safeguards.

Rosen has plenty more details on each point of the top ten. Go here for the full story.

The tips are not solely for the Brits. There’s plenty of information in the story that could prove invaluable to anyone living in a city or town where ultra-surveillance is rapidly closing in and who does not wish to submit to the Orwellian mantra of “If you ain’t done nothing wrong, you ain’t got narthin’ to worry about.”

If you ain’t done nothing wrong, you shouldn’t be under surveillance.