Surveillance - Part 1: Introduction

Understanding the art of surveillance – both detecting it and performing it when necessary – is importance to our continued well-being.

Physical surveillance, the art and science of following people around, logging their activities and catching them in some interesting act is an important subject for any member of a political resistance in a police state to understand. Being able to spot surveillance while it is being conducted is a vital life skill. It might be that a private investigator just wants to photograph an unfaithful spouse meeting their lover and the spouse has a vested interest in not being caught out. But surveillance, however brief, always precedes an attack - even if the attack is simply being served divorce papers. And the types of attack can take many other forms: robbery; rape; murder; burglary; terrorist assault; assassination; and yes, even a law enforcement arrest. Every single one of these follows the same type of operational cycle:

i. Target selection, including surveillance

ii. Information Gathering, mostly through surveillance

iii. Planning and Rehearsal, while continuing surveillance

iv. Deployment to the attack/incident site, with real time surveillance

v. Attack/incident

vi. Escape/get home safe

All of the above can happen in the blink of an eye as the criminal sizes up the female absorbed in her mobile phone and ear buds as she walks down the shopping street. But the predator is absolutely gathering information and sizing up his prey for a period of time to ensure he has made a good decision for an easy score on someone much weaker whom he can dominate.

Equally, history shows that surveillance may be conducted over a period of weeks, months or even years. Video tapes recovered in Afghanistan showed Al Qaeda had conducted surveillance over several years on western military targets in Singapore. And European terror groups such as Germany's Red Army Faction and Greece's 17 November spent weeks and weeks putting together kidnap and assassination operations against high level targets. In their attack in 1989 against the head of the Deutsche Bank, Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang) had the concealed command wire for a roadside bomb pulled up one month beforehand by a local worker but no-one thought anything of it at the time. The gang simply reconfirmed the pattern of life surveillance on the target and replanted the wire.

As we have previously discussed, defense against a street attack relies on tuned Situational Awareness to see it before it comes. It is equally applicable to any hostile act. Situational Awareness is the foundation of surveillance detection and vice versa. You must be plugged into your surroundings with as little distraction as possible for as long as possible.

The earlier you can identify surveillance activity against you, the more options you have and the greater your chances of living to fight another day.

No doubt some of the political prisoners from the 06 January 2021 DC Capitol trespass could have benefited from having surveillance detection skills. Ditto the hapless stooges who got entrapped by the FBI in the fake Michigan Governor Whitmer kidnap case. Or the members of the Oathkeepers who were close to its false flag founder. Or any parents protesting about Critical Race Theory at their local school board meeting who now have to contend with the threat of the FBI being just around the corner.

One of the very best ways to teach someone how to identify surveillance is to train them to be part of a surveillance team and give them the experience of following people around. After a while, a good surveillance operator will instinctively know where and how any surveillance adversary would position themselves in any given situation and will be attuned to the mannerisms and actions which give their game away. Alas, building and running a surveillance team in itself is a major, expensive undertaking and requires a lot of practice to become competent. It is not very practical for most people, though it can be illuminating for you (and a few friends) to try to follow a target (preferably someone who is briefed and playing along) one day to get even a little bit of a taste of how difficult it can be. Taking such an experience and trying to think from then on like an enemy surveillance team is very helpful.

Another major challenge is the explosion of the "smart" information age. Not too long ago, teaching traditional surveillance and its counter measures was a discreet, well contained subject as part of a broader curriculum in the law enforcement, military, intelligence and commercial investigation world. These days, however, the lines are much more blurred between surveillance, hacking, tracking and eavesdropping. Almost every one of us carries a smart phone which can all too easily:

- track our every movement

- listen to all of our conversations

- reveal every single person we meet

- map out our entire network of contacts

- capture photos and videos of all our activities.

Why stake someone out with an expensive two-legged team when you can sit back in your office and mine a wealth of data on the entire life of your target? Or if you do deploy a physical surveillance team, let the vehicles hang back and stay well out of sight until the target's phone tells you that something of great interest is happening and then swoop in for a much closer look.

Then there is the whole drone capability which has grown exponentially over the last 20 years. People rarely look up, so tracking them from the air with powerful cameras and listening devices adds a whole new dimension (ask the widows and orphans of literally thousands of Islamic terrorists).

Similarly, with the proliferation of quality security cameras on businesses, traffic stops, homes and government offices there are few places in built up areas where you can go without being observed and recorded multiple times. A Ring camera potentially on every door bell, dash-cams potentially on every car and, as soon as something happens, people whip out their phones and start recording (even in lieu of rendering first aid or other assistance). If a criminal target enters a department store, rather than have to close in and risk compromise a police surveillance team will often head straight to the security office and commandeer the bank of security cameras to continue following remotely.

The fact remains, however, that human eyes on a target at ground level will always have a role and will be a critical step in the most complex and sophisticated terrorist and counter terrorist operations, let alone more mundane but important scenarios closer to home. The confidence to break in to a house, kidnap a child or launch the FBI SWAT team in a pre-dawn raid on Roger Stone's house all require watching from a distance for a discreet period of time.

In a series of follow up articles over the coming months we aim to give you a firm understanding of all of this. We want to make you surveillance-aware and sensitized to the threat. The Department of Homeland Security tells you "If you see something, say something". We want you to be able to "Spot the heat around the corner before it hits".

We also want you to identify your own vulnerabilities and have good ideas for mitigation strategies. For instance, routines kill. Whether it is the animal which always drinks at the same time of day at the watering hole until it gets eaten by the crocodile, or the German banker who is driven on the same route at the same time each weekday by his security team. But countering surveillance can be full of conundrums. If you are a foreign spy who is under long-term surveillance by a local security agency and a traitor needs to pass you secrets, one of the very best ways to get away with it is to bore the pants off the surveillance team by establishing a routine over several months. At first the team are fired up and paranoid about everywhere you go and everything you do. But when you are doing the same thing week in and week out, they relax considerably because they believe they have it all worked out. A KGB officer in London England would always go to the mall with his family every Saturday. The MI5 surveillance team soon thought nothing of it. Except that he was passing money and receiving secrets from his source on the staircase of the parking garage once a month and they never noticed.