Anonymous dissent part 2 - Street surveillance [BTS]

Intro

If you walk down the street in a modern city, chances are you might stumble upon one of these banners. If it caught your eye, a hidden camera equipped with facial recognition AI would identify your brief moment of innocuous attention as a successful ad impression. The algorithm would get a print of your face, that print would lead them to your social media profiles, and later during the day, you would be served a Facebook ad related to the banner on the street.

A company called Clearview AI has collected more than 3 billion images from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and others to build their facial recognition tool. The AI has been rented to thousands of individuals and government agencies. The clients of Clearview AI include law enforcement agencies, big retail chains, schools, casinos as well as individuals.

The police used the tool to search for people involved in BLM protests, Capitol insurrection and petty crime. Some individual clients have used Clearview AI to stalk their own friends and family members.

The 21st century has erased the relative anonymity of the public square. Street surveillance is so advanced and ubiquitous today that anyone and everyone can be identified and tracked at a distance without consent.

No one should have a reasonable expectation of privacy when in public. But that doesn’t mean we still don’t have sensitive information that we would not want to be tracked. Health insurance companies would certainly want to pick up on the spike in your recent visits to the pharmacy. A victim of domestic abuse wouldn’t want to be followed by an AI tool rented by their abuser. A protester might want to join the cause but can’t afford the risk of being identified and have the police visit their home.

Nothing you do in public can be considered private. But if you can be anonymous, then it’s all you need to prevent linking your public activities to your identity.

Being anonymous when everyone is watching sounds like a skill reserved only to the top secret agents from a spy movie. But with a number of tweaks, you can render much of street surveillance tech and tactics useless.

It requires that you anonymize your digital devices and physical appearance. This guide is a two part series addressing just that. Part one explains how your phone broadcasts identifiable information into all directions which reveal your identity and location information. Yet following a a number of important steps, you can acquire an anonymous burner phone that you will be able to take with you and not have your activity linked to your real identity.

The success of a burner phone setup depends on your ability to obscure your appearance. Which is why in this part of the guide, you will learn the skills necessary to curb facial recognition AI and other more targeted surveillance tools used by adversaries to track you down.

This guide assumes the highest threat model that necessitates maximum anonymity achievable. It will be focused on the threat model of a protester in an authoritarian country where unjust crackdown is expected. You might have some freedom to tweak these steps according to your needs and situation. This guide will show what’s necessary to achieve anonymity in the streets assuming the adversary has the capability to deploy advanced camera surveillance at all locations in an urban area. It is assumed the adversary has the budget and resource for mass and targeted surveillance using all known techniques of advanced investigation.

Don’t take this guide as legal advice of any kind. It is your responsibility to ensure you are within the limits.

Anonymous protester

The path to become anonymous in the streets starts with your face.

Face

A face mask alone should be enough to thwart most facial recognition AI. There have been some headlines suggesting that new algorithms have learned to identify faces even when covered with a mask. However, upon closer inspection, these AI tools were trained on data sets that wouldn't occur in real life. So a face mask should still be a powerful defense against modern AI.

There is a better way to conceal your face and that is with a bandana or a scarf wrapped around your face from your nose down to your neck or chest. This would completely conceal the entire bottom half of your face, including its most prominent features like cheek bones, jaw line and chin.

If you put on sunglasses big enough to cover your eyebrows, the glasses would disguise the top layer of your facial bones. This would make even face detection difficult because there wouldn’t be much left for the AI to pick up.

A disguise like this would be more than enough to defend against passive facial recognition that runs automatically on camera feeds. However, if you are picked for a target, other parts of your appearance will be used to track you.

During the Hong Kong demonstrations where a lot of protesters wore face masks, police used pictures of their ears and hair styles to track them down. By the very least, you should remove earrings, jewelry or piercings and wear a headband to completely cover your ears. Even better would be to wear a hat or a hoodie to stash your hair in.

If you can’t conceal certain features of your appearance for reasons such as the weather would make it too uncomfortable, try to change the features into the opposite direction. If your hair is dark, dye them blonde. If you’re a ginger, I feel sorry for you. If you have tattoos, put on makeup. If you are used to wearing makeup, try a completely different yet still bland and uninteresting style.

Clothes

Facial recognition AI is only one out of many different pattern recognition tools that can track you. In street surveillance, image recognition is another ubiquitous  AI used for finding and tracking identities.

Think about your appearance as an image. That image will produce a print which can be traced across your physical and digital presence and reveal your identity when you are not covering your face.

Therefore, taking care of your  face is only the beginning. The next step is to anonymize your clothing.

From a T-shirt to shoes, choose clothing that is in bland monochrome colors with no identifiable patterns or markings. Darker or less saturated colors don’t attract as much attention so it will be easier to blend in with the crowd. No piece of your clothing should display a visible text, image, or logo.

If the weather allows it, wear long sleeve shirts and pants. If you have any tattoos, cover them up as much as possible. If sleeves are not an option, use makeup or bandanas.

Tattoo recognition

Your tattoos could easily compromise all efforts to obscure your identity in the streets. Tattoo recognition is another AI tool adversaries use to identify targets. If the image of your tattoo cannot be conclusive discerned, a mere position and general shape of the tattoo can be enough to narrow down the selection in a larger data set of possible matches.

If you are detained, pictures of your tattoos will be taken by the police and stored in a permanent record. Tattoos are flagged with dozens of metadata points that more precisely classify and can narrow down the search. Categories like political symbols, sports icons and specific images are metadata points that help the tattoo recognition algorithm find you.

The police might have access to photos of your tattoos without you even realizing it. Any routine stop, body cam footage or collected business surveillance will be scanned for tattoos and stored for later use. Images you post on your social media provide the easiest vector to permanently match a tattoo to your name.

Quick change

Your anonymous clothing must be disposable. If you wear the same clothes on your commute to and from the protest and during the protest, street surveillance will uncover your identity by tracking your route to your home.

In the Hong Kong protests, police dyed the water cannons blue to mark everyone who attended the protest and then arrest anyone leaving the scene with blue marks on their clothes.

This is why you should learn the practice of quick change. A quick change is a protocol for changing your profile during a mission to escape a compromised scene. There are multiple options to go about this.

One is to bring a set of clothes with you in a backpack that you can change into on the go as you are leaving the protest. The new clothes should change your profile into the opposite direction as much as possible. If you were a protester before, you should change into a tourist or a business manager.

If you keep your quick change in a backpack you took to the protest, you might have to flip it inside out or discard it to prevent the backpack from linking your profiles.

Another method is to prepare a quick change on a specific location in advance. Before attending a protest, you can stash your clothes in this location and change into the anonymous persona on the day of the protest. When leaving the protest, you can return to this location to change into your normal profile.

This quick change location should give you enough plausible deniability that you couldn’t be the only person coming in and out. So a bathroom stall where you enter as a normie and leave as a maskie won’t do it. Your quick change location should ideally be unsupervised.

Gait recognition

The way you conduct your walk produces a unique fingerprint known as gait. Gait recognition software can identify individuals just by analyzing a footage of them walking without needing any other data points.

According to the CIA’s Former Chief of Disguise Jonna Mendez, a pebble in shoe or bandage around your knee might be enough to force yourself to change your gait. You should not rely on your willpower alone to consciously change your gait.

Commute

When commuting to and from the area, keep in mind that your personal phone should not be used in the protest location or even during the commute. If you want to use a phone at a protest, use a burner phone that can only be tied to the protest and nothing else.

The best practice is to keep your personal phone at home and only bring a burner phone to the location. Keep your burner phone turned off outside of the protest to prevent location data from being correlated to your home address.

For information on proper burner phone setup and use, follow part one of this guide.

Travel data will be one of the most important focus points to narrow down the search for targets. The arrival and departure from the area must be done as anonymously as possible.

Autonomous license plate reader systems almost entirely rule out the use of your car. ALPRs are routinely used by cities, police and businesses to track drivers over time. If the car is registered to your name or business, this is an easy target.

One way to go about this is to purchase a new car with cash and register it to an anonymous LLC. You’d have to form this LLC in advance and it would only work if you can do so without providing your personal details. In most countries and states, this is not gonna be legally possible.

Public transport might be a safer option. In some cases, you should be able to buy a one way ticket without providing your ID. Most ticket sale places will be surveilled by cameras, so you need to be mindful about obscuring your face and profile during purchase.

If you can’t obtain an anonymous ticket, don’t travel to the location directly. Exit a few stops away and either walk or bike the remaining distance.

Law enforcement have resorted to using advanced aerial surveillance on protests in the past. Much of the military technology is making its away into domestic policing. High-altitude drones equipped with infra-red or multi-gigapixel cameras can monitor dozens of targets for more than 12 hours without refueling.

Take advantage of natural blind spots like an underground subway station or an underpass to perform a quick change and head to your mode of transportation in a different profile.

Escape strategy

If you follow all the steps carefully, it should be very difficult for an adversary to identify you and track you down. Train yourself in situational awareness and be prepared to escape the scene whenever the situation escalates. You want to avoid getting caught or arrested and having to strip down your anonymity defenses.

You might need to find the balance between in engaging and keeping a safe distance. Be mindful of infiltrators and informants in your operation. To be secure, never reveal anything that could lead to your identity. Compartmentalize your group so that no individual knows enough to compromise the security of others.

Security is a never-ending rabbit hole. The best approach is to assume you are never completely secure and you should have an escape strategy if things go wrong. Feel free to download this guide along with all the sources linked in the description for further training. If you have experience with anonymous protesting and defending against street surveillance, share your input in the comments. This could be a valuable teaching moment for others. Stay safe!