Comment by leroy_masochist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leroy_masochist | Hacker News Reader

leroy_masochist

It's a really interesting topic and I'd say I was disappointed by the article for several reasons:

1. Very outdated in terms of the extent to which people hiding today would leave a digital signature. The article literally suggests leaving no available photographs of you, to the point where acquaintances have to work with a sketch artist to put your picture out.

2. Some very naive suggestions for jobs to take while on the run, including doing data entry, working as a day laborer, and joining the Peace Corps.

3. Made-up tinfoil-hat "facts". For example: "Satellites can bounce LASER light off of your windows and, by measuring the minute distance differences between a vibrating window and the satellite, reconstruct your speech -- from orbit!"

Note: this is not true. The pinnacle of laser surveillance (which is actually a real thing) is measured in the hundreds of meters.

This is actually a really cool topic, and best practices in escape and evasion are fascinating. I think the outline of a better manual would look like:

1. Figuring out where you're going to hide (best hope is bland suburb of large metro area in a far-away country where you're not ethnically unusual....e.g., Sao Paulo, Lagos, Taipei, or a frontier market that attracts a lot of expats, e.g., Mongolia, Nairobi, Manila). Additional discussion of extradition law and whether you should prioritize non-extradition countries relative to your country of citizenship. Additional discussion of how to learn the language and culture of your new home without attracting attention.

2. Figuring out how you're going to survive in your new life; refinement of potential destinations based on skill set, age, life goals, etc.

3. Prepping your new life (surreptitiously creating bank accounts, documents, contacts in new residence).

4. Making the break; how to disappear so that authorities classify you as missing and presumed dead.

5. Forensic considerations (facial recognition, DNA, voiceprint, fingerprints, digital signature).

Would be great to hear others' thoughts on what such a manual would look like, I love to nerd out on this kind of stuff.

Not totally on-topic, but interesting. Reconstruct sound by analyzing video of a potato-chip bag: http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_rubinstein_see_invisible_mo...

I think you just gave Light a heart attack.

> The pinnacle of laser surveillance ... hundreds of meters

I suspect the limitation is atmospheric distortion which astronomers have pretty much solved a ways back, by observing a laser pilot beam. Considering they can look through about a dozen km of air (upwards) like that, it's not a stretch to think spook gear can go a dozen km horizontally to a window.

That said, that's not a haystack tech; someone would be onto you already if they were using it.

The spooks do use similar technology to process downwards-looking images, but I still don't think they're at the point of reading your conversation off your windows from space, though, based off of the maturity of the various systems.

Does it matter, for practical purposes, if they do laser acoustics to your windows from space, or from a drone a few miles away?

Yes, it may matter which capability exists. If the capability exists from space, it means that they can easily switch between targets across a large swath of areas, as compared to deploying a drone near you. Have you seen laser acoustics deployed from a drone or similar platform before? It seems like getting a sufficiently stable mount on a drone would be a blocker here, although I'm not familiar with the state of that technology.

My company is developing sensors that implement these sorts of coherent interferometric ranging techniques, and I can say that it's pretty unlikely that it works from space or from a drone. There are a lot of non-obvious factors that make performing those kind of measurements from orbit a bit of a nightmare.

As far as I understand space comms--which isn't that far--the 'pilot beam' technique used by satellite links is more or less a way to get a phase lock on the signal beam, which will accurately determine the exact target location, at which point the space transmitter can use a beam-forming antenna to to jack up the power to that locale specifically, giving better SNR/bandwidth/whatever. The key bit here is that (a) the method requires that the target--i.e. your bedroom window--transmits the pilot beam up, and (b) only 'solves' the atmospheric interference issue by pointing a powerful beam accurately.

Don't get me wrong, it could probably be done with enough money, and if anybody could do it would would be the US intelligence machine. Same goes for a drone, to a lesser extent. With anything flying in the atmosphere you'll have to do deal with local vibrations on the same order as the measurement deltas you care about, but there are ways to do that too. It's interesting, thinking about it now, that a lot of what we're developing could actually be directly applied to such an endeavor, even though we're not related to such industries at all. Fun.

Yep, that's what I figured. Thanks for the input from someone with some real knowledge on the subjects.

>1. Very outdated in terms of the extent to which people hiding today would leave a digital signature. The article literally suggests leaving no available photographs of you, to the point where acquaintances have to work with a sketch artist to put your picture out.

Number 1 would be nearly impossible for me. Facebook has many photos other people uploaded which include me. My parents and girlfriend probably have more photos of me than I do of myself.

> Made-up tinfoil-hat "facts". For example: "Satellites can bounce LASER light off of your windows and, by measuring the minute distance differences between a vibrating window and the satellite, reconstruct your speech -- from orbit!"

I agree that this is untruthful, but speech reconstruction _is_ possible if the distance is much smaller (across the street, rather than dozens of km up in the sky).

> The pinnacle of laser surveillance (which is actually a real thing) is measured in the hundreds of meters.

You skipped the very next line, which says exactly this.

On top of that, while I don't think satellite laser listening tech exists, we don't in fact know what they are capable off.

I work with environmental data, part of which includes global measurement of wind speed at the water surface. Now, I'm certainly not an expert on how the sensors work exactly, but as far as I have read, satellites bounce microwaves off the surface of the water, where the wind creates ripples - not the big waves, but the small ones, often less than a centimeter in height. The scatterometer then analyzes the height differences of the ripples (differences are in millimeters or less) and runs a model to figure out how fast and from which direction the wind is blowing.

Based on this I would not be surprised if something similar as described in the grandparent post is possible with the latest and greatest in spy satellites. I'm guessing it would only be used with extremely high-value targets though. There is some interesting information available via the NRO if you dig around a bit.

Scatterometry is not accurately measuring distances or a elevation model. Instead it relies "on the fact that winds moving over the sea influence the radar backscattering properties of its surface in a manner that is related to wind speed and wind direction."

Source: http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet102/Gelsthorpe102.p...

Do you have any good references for your statement about laser surveillance? Generally speaking, although the us government is a wallowing pile of inefficiency, it generally tends to be true that our military technology is a fair bit ahead of where it is thought to be. I didn't even know satellite laser surveillance was a thing, so I am genuinely curious here.

http://www.spybusters.com/Laser_Beam_Eavesdropping.html

You know the satellite laser thing can't be true. Even in the absence of atmospheric distortion a good satellite resolution is measured in centimeters. And that's for still pictures.

For the most part, I don't see the point.

For me, at least, what matters is keeping stuff private that I want private. For everything else, my primary goal is being unremarkable, except for career reputation and so on. Trying too hard to disappear just attracts attention, no?

You're thinking along the right lines. They think in profiles of people that look or act a certain way. Some are much more traceable than others. You have to pick a profile that resists traceable tech while blending into that overall group. In my area, it's probably the rural rednecks given they have believable reasons to use little tech and mostly use cash. Those two traits, especially, have to be part of the culture to blend into less traceability.

Also, plenty nearby wifi connections for you to use with a cantenna. So, suburbs bridging city and rural types are best. ;)

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