How to Disappear

Night Stalker

How to Disappear


The Mind's Eye
How to Disappear


Your inbox is awash in spam, your boss is chuckling over your credit report, and you've got a sneaking suspicion that Uncle Sam counts how many L?wenbr?u you chug. Yes, your privacy's shot to hell, and you're tempted to shrug and settle for an open source life. But privacy isn't like virginity, forever lost after the first trespass. With some work, "reprivatization" is possible. Use this three-tiered guide to pick a level of solitude. But be warned: Going all the way off the grid is more Ted Kaczynski than Howard Hughes.

Going

Diss credit: Want to be hard to find? Start by dashing off stern opt-out letters to the big database companies and credit bureaus - Experian, Acxiom, Equifax. These folks may make a mint peddling personal info, but they can be cajoled into stopping. First, though, they'll make you jump through hoops - like filling out a 1040-sized form or idling in toll-free hell. Junkbusters (www.junkbusters.com) has a good list of opt-out addresses.

Anonymize: Ditch your ISP and sign up with a service that lets you surf by proxy, keeping your IP address concealed. Send email via an anonymous remailer like Mixmaster, a digital middleman that scrambles timestamps and message sizes. And if you're going to be advocating the violent overthrow of the government or bragging about your cool new bong, make sure your remailer routes messages through multiple machines.

Grok the fine print: Boring as it sounds, read the privacy statements that clutter your mailbox around tax time and sever ties with companies that admit, "Our privacy policy may change over time" - industry lingo for "We reserve the right to screw you."

Going Further

Ditch the digits:Want to drop out?Start by rustling up a new Social Security number.

The Social Security Administration doesn't accept paranoia as a criterion for granting a new card, but it recognizes cultural objections and religious pleas. One stratagem: Contend that your credit has been irrevocably damaged by a number-related snafu, or that you live in fear of a stalker who knows your digits. Once you switch your SSN, never use it. Instead, dole out 078-05-1120, an Eisenhower-era card that works 99 percent of the time.

Call cell-free: Use the humble pay phone. Mobile phones are being outfitted with global positioning satellite chips to comply with an FCC mandate. By 2006, all wireless networks must feature 911-friendly tracking technology. Marketers are cooking up ways to capitalize, like zapping burger coupons to your Nokia as you stroll by a fast-food joint.

Pay full price: You may relish saving 10 percent on Prell, but deep-six your buyers' club cards. Supermarkets and pharmacies haven't yet perfected the art of data mining, but it won't be long. "If you're having a child custody fight, they could subpoena your frequent-shopper cards and say, 'Look, he's buying too many potato chips, he's hurting the kids,'" says Robert Gellman, a Washington-based privacy consultant.

Gone

Move: Want to go completely off the grid? Start by moving - address changes bedevil databasers. But don't buy a home. All those loan apps will blow your cover. Residential hotels smell like cheap cigars and urine, but at least you can register under a pseudonym. Give a fake address: 3500 S. Wacker, Chicago, IL, 60616 - the front door for Comiskey Park.

Toss your cards:Pay cash for everything, and don't plan on a life of luxury. Any (legal) cash transaction more than $10,000 triggers government reporting regulations, which means you can forget about that Cadillac Escalade you've had your eye on. Settle for the subway or bus, using coins rather than prepaid fare cards, which keep a record of trips.

Go incognito: *-recognition gear will soon be ubiquitous in public spaces. To fool the systems, invest in a pair of bulky aviator sunglasses and a hat. If you fear being tailed, alter your gait every time you hit the street - a pigeon-toed shuffle one day, a bowlegged amble the next. There are also Central American plastic surgery mills, beloved of drug lords, that can alter the loops and whorls on your fingertips. It'll set you back 10 Gs, but then, Costa Rican doctors have been known to accept gold Rolexes in lieu of cash.

- Brendan I. Koerner
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.07/start.html?pg=14


"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878

Night Stalker

From The Economist print edition

Military technology: Advances in camouflage, concealment and deception are revolutionising an age-old art of warfare

http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11999355

AS A special-forces agent in the French Navy, Michel Malalo has clandestinely entered several African countries by sea to extract endangered French nationals. Almost all the enemy fighters he encountered carried the AK-47, a widely used assault rifle renowned for its rugged reliability. But the AK-47 has a serious drawback: glint, which gave Mr Malalo an advantage in firefights. Made with steel, the AK-47 reflects light. "It's flashy-and from afar," says Mr Malalo, who took advantage of glint giveaways when shooting at the enemy. Mr Malalo, who left the special forces uninjured six years ago, says the French assault rifle, the Famas, is superbly non-reflective even in bright light.

Developing new metal alloys to reduce rifle glint is just one facet of the effort to develop better camouflage, concealment and deception technologies that is under way at defence contractors, military research bodies and university laboratories. Most of this research is being conducted in America and Europe. Much is classified. The results are often remarkable.

Even the most common form of camouflage-the coloured patterns printed onto combat fatigues-is being given a high-tech twist, as designers work with new software that incorporates neuroscientists' understanding of human vision. Pattern-generation software analyses a large number of photographs of a given theatre of operations. By crunching meteorological data on typical lighting and visibility conditions, combined with information about the colours and predominance of shapes visible in cities, fields and wilderness areas, the software proposes new, improved patterns. "It really does get technical," says R?jean Duchesneau, a lieutenant-colonel with NATO in Casteau, Belgium, who helped design a Canadian camouflage pattern called CADPAT.

Some camouflage designers, including those at America's Army Research Laboratory, also study the reflective and light-absorbing properties of materials common to an area, such as sand, cement and foliage. As well as being used by the camouflage-generation software, this information is used to manufacture fabric inks with the desired optical properties. Similar software optimises colours and patterns for vehicles and aircraft. The ability to customise camouflage for particular theatres has increased the use of temporary camouflage, which is painted on hardware before missions and washed off afterwards.

For decades most fatigues, now referred to as battledress uniforms, incorporated wiggly patterns of solid colours known as tiger stripes. But research in the field of "clutter metrics"-the study of how well observers locate and identify objects-has recently discredited tiger stripes. With the help of eye-tracking devices that follow iris movements to determine where subjects are looking, researchers have determined that fabrics with small squares of colour, known as pixels, are harder to see. These new pixel patterns are now worn by many Western armies, including those of the United States, Britain, Canada, France and Germany. Canada has improved its camouflage so much in recent years that to spot soldiers in some conditions, observers must be 40% closer than they would have to have been in 2000.

"Adaptive" camouflage that changes rapidly in response to the environment is also in the works. TNO, a Dutch defence contractor based in Soesterberg, is using thin, textile-like plastic sheets embedded with light-emitting diodes (LEDs). A small camera scans the environment, and the colours and patterns displayed on the sheet are changed accordingly. The material is not yet flexible enough to be worn comfortably by soldiers, but it is being tested in Afghanistan with Saab Barracuda, a Swedish maker of camouflage equipment.

Pieter Jacobs, TNO's chief technologist, says the defence ministries of Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, which have funded the development of the technology, consider such "chameleon" sheeting to be an urgent requirement. Maarten Hogervorst, a vision neuroscientist at TNO, says its performance is formidable. A tank draped with the sheeting and parked in front of a grassy slope displays an image of grass on its exposed side, for example.

Another kind of adaptive camouflage is based on flexible plastic decals. A small camera, powered by a solar cell, senses the colours and patterns of the surroundings. The surface of the decal is a crude computer display which then replicates these colours and patterns. The US Army wants to use this approach to wrap artillery and munitions containers. Daniel Watts, who leads the project at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), says it works well but is still too expensive for battlefield use.

Some like it hot

Concealing things on the battlefield does not just mean hiding them visually. A lot of research is also being done to reduce thermal signatures, too. Infra-red and thermal-vision equipment can reveal a soldier's heat signature at a large distance. Such equipment is becoming less expensive and is now so readily available that the Taliban in Afghanistan are well equipped with it-unlike a few years ago, says Hans Kariis, a senior technologist at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, a government body in Stockholm.

Fabrics designed to block human heat-signatures are improving rapidly. John Roos, a retired US Army colonel in Newport News, Virginia, recently observed a night-time test of an infra-red "stealth" poncho developed by AAE, a small defence contractor based in Fullerton, California. It was the most impressive infra-red protection he had seen. The man disappeared like "a black void", Mr Roos says. (The head of AAE, Rashid Zeineh, declined to discuss the fabric's composition.)

America's existing heat-blocking garments already provide a remarkable combat advantage, says Mr Roos. They are similar, but inferior, to the AAE stealth poncho, he says. During some night operations, American soldiers may be heard approaching while remaining concealed in the dark. "You can imagine what that would do to enemy morale," Mr Roos says.

One way to block body-heat signatures is to use particles called cenospheres-tiny hollow spheres of aluminium and silica that can be woven into fabrics. A leader in the field, Ceno Technologies, in Buffalo, New York, is developing a cenosphere body-paint for the face and hands which does not block necessary perspiration. Britain's Ministry of Defence is testing it.

Researchers at the NJIT, meanwhile, have developed insulating decals that can be applied to hot objects-even firing artillery cannons-to mask their heat signatures. Even if the heat signature cannot be concealed entirely, decals can be placed so that they alter the signature's shape. Mr Watts says his team has been successful in partially insulating tanks so that observers with night vision see the shape of a car.

This is a useful trick, because entirely eliminating a vehicle's heat-signature can be extremely difficult. Intermat, a Greek supplier of concealment materials to defence contractors including British Aerospace, Lockheed Martin and Thales, produces a foam coating that also smothers heat signatures. Bill Filis of Intermat says that selectively applying a one-centimetre layer of heat-insulating foam can make an armoured personnel-carrier resemble a motorcycle when viewed through thermal-vision goggles. "Make him wonder, and this buys you time," Mr Filis says.

Some thermal coatings are as thin as a coat of paint, so they can be applied to aircraft. But warplanes present an additional problem. When flying high to avoid anti-aircraft fire, white condensation trails, or "contrails", can form "a giant arrow in the sky pointing to where the plane is," says Charles Kolb, chief executive of Aerodyne Research in Billerica, Massachusetts. Researchers at the firm, which is a contractor to America's air force, are examining the thermodynamic processes that lead to the formation of contrails, in the hope of reducing them using chemical additives.

Even as people, weapons and vehicles become harder to spot, however, new detection technologies are also being developed. In the spring of 1999 NATO warplanes flew more than 38,000 sorties over Serbia, in a bombing campaign that succeeded in pushing Serbian forces out of Kosovo. But surprisingly little damage was done to Serbian materiel. Duped NATO pilots had destroyed dummy tanks, artillery and other items of military hardware made out of wood and tarpaulins. Much of Serbia's real military kit was hidden safely under foliage, which interferes with standard radar.

Engineers at Lockheed Martin, a large American defence contractor, have designed a radar system called FOPEN, short for foliage penetration. It became operational in 2005, but still requires further development and is deployed on just one active American warplane so far. But Lockheed Martin's FOPEN programme manager, Robert Robertson, says the radar "will see whatever man made" under a leafy triple canopy, or under netting designed to foil conventional radar systems.

"Stealth" aircraft, designed to avoid detection by radar, have been around since the 1970s. Radar systems illuminate the target with radio waves and then look for reflections, so absorbing incoming radiation, or deflecting it in a totally different direction, can shrink an aircraft's radar signature dramatically. Half a dozen countries now build stealth aircraft, at great expense.

A new type of radar system, however, is capable of spotting such aircraft. It relies on the proliferation of mobile-phone signals. When a plane flies through an environment filled with such signals, the "aircraft shadow in this chatter" becomes visible, says John Pendry, a radar expert at Imperial College in London. Mike Burns, the president of MSE, a small defence contractor in Billerica, Massachusetts, says stealth bombers have indeed been detected against backgrounds of mobile-phone radiation because "a hole" appears in the constant chatter of signals.

This technique can be used only in populated areas, with lots of mobile phones. But it has an edge over standard radar, in addition to being able to spot previously invisible aircraft. It is "passive", because it uses ambient radiation to illuminate the target. This means the target aircraft cannot tell that it is being watched (whereas it can with traditional radar). In short, it is the radar-detection system, rather than the aircraft, that has become invisible. It is just the latest example of the arms race between concealment and detection.

Spartacus

got any pics?[:D]

LaidbackDan

quote:Originally posted by tplumeri
got any pics?[:D]
They are there in the article, just hard to see.