How to Evade Digital Surveillance – Two Techniques that Work!
Summary
➡ The text discusses mass surveillance and the extensive data collection devices and big tech corporations can perform, focusing on real IP addresses, commercial VPNs, and geofencing data. It emphasizes how phones, particularly iPhones and Google Androids, constantly track and record user location via Wi-Fi triangulation. The author argues that these devices and their functionalities have been utilised by law enforcement during investigations, notably the January 6 Capitol riots. The text argues for the use of de-Googled phones and VPN services to mitigate these surveillance issues.
➡ The text is inviting the audience to sign up for a store on Brax, assuring that no personal information like email would be needed for sign up, and thanking them for their attention.
Transcript
Governments assume the worst of you. You need to be observed in case you do something bad. You’re assumed to be guilty until proven innocent, something supposedly protected by the Fourth Amendment in the US. But they know how to get around that. Big tech companies benefit from being able to influence you both in purchase choices, style choices, and even social, political, or religious beliefs. The days of being left alone are gone for the normal person, and the normies have no idea that they’re under someone else’s control.
For the smarter among you, what I will teach you today is how to understand the infrastructure of digital surveillance and how to basically evade a large portion of it. It’s probably impossible to be truly free from observation by the corporate machines and the state. But the less information they have about you, the less you matter to them and the less their influence on you. But I will discuss this differently today.
I will teach you how to resist this digital surveillance, but with technical explanations of why it will work. Now this is not a complete analysis of digital surveillance. I will cherry pick only a couple of main topics and the rest will have to wait to be in a separate video. By the way, simply giving you a to do list is not my channel’s approach. I will give you a deeper understanding of the technology used to track you and how to beat it.
Stay right there. First things first. You need to understand the opposition who is doing the digital surveillance and what is their intent. The most obvious sorts, as revealed to us by Edward Snowden, are the three letter agencies in the US and whatever equivalent agencies you have in your country. Now this is a nearly impossible threat to completely eliminate, because a digital threat from mass surveillance goes beyond your use of a computing device.
Governments can not only scan the Internet, they have access to your exact identity through driver’s licenses, Social Security, medical and tax records. They also today have surveillance cameras on the freeways, streets, corners, even access to the videos of ring cameras installed by unaware citizens and more. And these devices are powered by other means of identification, like license plate readers and facial recognition or voice prints. For these, I have no direct solution, especially if you live in a big city.
But again, the approach I have is to give the opposition as limited information as possible and make you become less important. Mass surveillance in the past was focused on phone activity. Today, as in the past, governments have access to who you call and who calls you. They know every phone and texting contact and every text you make is visible as well. This is all kept in the FBI DCIS database and guaranteed access to all phone traffic, including wiretapping, is ensconced in the Kalia law.
In my last video I showed you the technical details of how our web traffic can be decrypted so it can be observed by some government or corporation. I also showed that this can be done to all emails and push notifications. The approach to evading digital surveillance has to be a global understanding of all data collected by all sources. I will present to you two common solutions which help in resisting the surveillance.
Unfortunately, because I’m explaining things in detail, I can only cover two in this video there are more, but I have to address them in later videos. I will tell you why these solutions work and that will be the most important part of this video. A VPN, or virtual private network is very common now, and I will state this upfront. A VPN will stop a man in the middle threat by a government.
I’m going to explain the mechanics of why this is the case. Apple, by the way, offers the iCloud private relay, which is meant to convince you that it operates much like a VPN, though it really doesn’t. I’ll explain this more later. The primary reason for a VPN, as understood by most, is that it hides the IP address of the user. Everything we do on the Internet is recorded with the IP address, and if that address is our home router, then obviously your identity is clearly known at all times.
A VPN routes your traffic through a tunnel and exits at the VPN server. This tunnel is encrypted and cannot be observed by someone examining network traffic. In my last video I explained that the web encryption used in most of our Internet activity can be broken if someone has a root certificate on your computer that they control. This is a primary tool used by governments to surveil network traffic.
The problem for governments is that using root certificate techniques to break encryption does not work for a VPN. The reason is that the VPN certificate is not checked against some certificate authority. Instead, a VPN client, like an OpenVPN, already has the certificates preloaded so that the VPN client and VPN server has already pre negotiated the encryption. So basically a VPN is immune from manipulation by a rogue certificate authority.
Governments know this, so you will find that countries like China, Saudi Arabia ban vpns. I know this for a fact since I have customers who tried using my VPN in these two places and they do not work. I believe they do this by banning certain domains. Some attempt to track vpns was done in the US a couple of years ago. I did a video on the fact that port 1119 four, which was the standard port for vpns, was blocked totally in the US for around three days.
Maybe it was a test. I watched this happen and then watched this become undone. I actually had the help of some people from Linode at the time to identify this and we discovered that the blocking was occurring in the middle of the network somewhere. But today most vpns no longer use port 1119 four. VPN traffic can be directed to any port, so it is easy to obfuscate. Now let me tell you about another secondary VPN benefit.
I can’t speak for all VPN services, but this is a specific feature of our VPN bytesVPN. We serve global DNS for all VPN users through a Pihole DNS server. Pihole is an open source project that allows DNS blocking of ad domains so the obvious sources of ad domains are prevented from being resolved and thus your device will not allow Internet traffic from these ad sites. But the side benefit of pihole is that it caches DNS.
This means that if 1000 people search for facebook. com, our DNS server will only seek that domain externally, just one time per caching period. Also, because the DNS server is external from your location, you are basically protected from something called DNS hijacking. DNS hijacking is a precursor to mass surveillance that redirects you to a proxy server that can examine your Internet encrypted traffic. In any case, the primary benefit of a VPN changes now from just hiding an IP address.
A VPN actually prevents the man in the middle attack by a state player or even a corporation. Now this is a legitimate fear, and I will state this since the VPN aggregates traffic onto VPN servers, if the VPN company is in cahoots with a rogue party, it becomes possible to track users via the VPN servers. I state this so there is transparency here. I think this is pretty devious for a VPN company to do, and if they did do this and they got caught, then they risked the trust of their customers and they could get wiped out in an instant being a VPN company ourselves.
This of course is why I think you need to trust your VPN provider. Now, I’m not trying to sell our VPN here, but at least the difference between us and some other VPNs is that the owner of the VPN is known to you. Besides, we’re likely too small to be a target of some three letter agency. Now, I mentioned Apple iCloud private relay earlier, and I said it is not really a VPN.
I want to make sure you understand this icloud private relay does not encrypt traffic. All it does is redirect traffic to proxy servers. This will successfully hide your ip addresses, so that is a promised benefit by Apple. And here it succeeds. However, the problem of a man in the middle is actually accentuated here. First, Apple has centralized unencrypted iPhone traffic through the designated proxy servers, and thus allow a centralized place to do a man in the middle attack by some state player.
Granted, an MITM at an Apple proxy server requires Apple to be in cahoots with the state. But even if the goal isn’t decryption of web traffic, that proxy server has a record of all activities based on the real IP addresses of people accessing the proxy server and the websites they want to visit. In other words, it is potentially another giant source of mass surveillance data. Personally, I would avoid any kind of promise protection by any large entity that can aggregate large amounts of data, as it is often a feeder for mass surveillance.
Stick to commercial vpns Geofencing is a big example of what is known as warrantless spying. It allows a law enforcement agency to do digital surveillance of a community without a warrant and therefore bypass the Fourth Amendment. What geofencing specifically means is that a government can find all people with phones in a specific geographic area at a given time. What most people don’t understand is how they do this.
I’ve made a ton of videos about location tracking, and I often get disbelief when I state what I state, which is that if you have a regular phone or what I call a Normie phone, then your locations are recorded at all times and you cannot stop this. I’ll re explain all this in a moment, but a normie phone is an iPhone or some Google Android phone. That’s the phone of 99.
9% of the population. These are clearly excellent mass surveillance devices, though you might wonder how they’re connected to the government. Aren’t these phone operating systems made by Apple and Google, not a government? And don’t I have the ability to stop these firms from getting my location, though I get a lot of pushback with my broadbrush statements. The fact is that my analysis that I’ve discussed for years have been proven over and over in various court cases.
The most recent example is the January 6 riots at the Capitol. So far, close to a thousand people have been charged in the Capitol riots. The main proof that these people were inside the capitol building was by the use of Google geofencing. This was data provided from what Google calls the Google sensor vault. The reason we know this is that Google openly discusses that they provide government with geofencing data.
In fact, these court cases have the geofencing data as evidence. We know less about Apple’s willingness to share geofencing data though. The reality is that any corporation can be forced to share this kind of data in support of the Patriot act, and if they do share it, they cannot discuss it. So we may distinguish between the use of geofencing data for law enforcement versus intelligence collection. Historically, big tech has shared this data with three letter agencies and that has been documented by Snowden.
This kind of information has been paid for, so it is not some corporate freebie. The main concern of most people is that they think they have control over their location data on their phones. They go to their iPhones and turn off location except for a few limited apps and they think they are safe. But yet geolocation from Apple and Google discovers where they are. The problem is that this is a marketing lie.
IPhones and Google Androids cannot be stopped from revealing locations. All you’re able to stop are third parties from seeing the locations collected by Apple and Google. The truth is that phones do 24/7 location tracking and this is reported to the phone’s hq. One of the data leaks in phones, and there are several, is called Wi Fi scanning. Your exact location in Metro areas is determined by Wi Fi triangulation, which is used for indoor tracking.
This technique acquires your position by finding the strength of Wi Fi signals near you. And the position of every Wi Fi router is known in advance. Which begs the question, how did Apple and Google know the position of every Wi Fi router? Enter Wi Fi scanning this is a site process in every device. Your phone’s Wi Fi is continuously detecting all Wi Fi routers in the area, and these routers announce themselves using an identifier called a Mac address.
Then the OS, knowing your actual gps location, can map the locations of the other Wi Fi routers based on signal strength. Because this information is provided by lots of people walking around with phones in your area. Through mathematical computations, the exact location of every router in the world has been figured out. I call this process wifi scanning, though that term has been hijacked too, to mean something else.
The point is that your phone has to send information about every router nearby together with your gps position. You are all part of this data collection. So obviously it means your phone identifier, be it a Google ID, Apple ID, or hardware identifier like an IMEI is always connected to a location since this cannot be stopped. But here’s the interesting part. It can be stopped if you have a phone running Android open source project, or AOSP, which I generically call a Google phone.
You basically do not participate in Wi Fi scanning. Wi Fi scanning requires a direct messaging connection with Apple or Google. An AOSP phone does not have any Google code in it, so there is no mechanism for it to send this kind of data to Google. And this is not an iPhone, so it won’t send data to Apple either. Thus a d Google phone is immune from geofencing. Now, having said this, it is still possible for some government to find out a rough location, maybe within a quarter of a mile.
This is not exact as the geofencing. This is enabled by Google using a GPS feature called supple. I explained this in another video, but basically all modern phones use something called assisted GPS or AGPS. In order to speed up the acquisition of a GPS location, your phone needs to determine which GPS satellites are nearby so your device doesn’t waste time checking each satellite frequency individually. This is done by the supple technology.
Again, this is built into every phone wifi chip. Nowadays your phone finds the nearest cell tower and then reports that tower identity to supple google. com. And then that site returns the list of satellites near that tower. This allows almost instantaneous GPS signals instead of the one to two minute delay in the past. The problem is that the supple technology and its patent was bought by Google. So basically Google has all supple queries in the entire world, which basically means all phones can be identified by a cell tower location by Google.
And this is another one of those things that cannot be turned off because it is hard coded into every os. This one we are studying though we have a de Google phone OS, Brax OS. We have tried techniques like rerouting the supple traffic, but this isn’t fully solved. Secondarily, even without supple, everyone’s location in relation to a tower is always known. If you have a SIM card and your phone is on.
The only solution to this is to turn the phone off or remove the SIM card. When you want to stop this kind of tracking on RD Google phones, you can disable the SIM card without physically removing it via the os settings. Now let me talk about iPhones specifically because iPhones offer a greater accuracy in location tracking now because of air tags and even when the phone is off.
This is one of the reasons I specifically abhor using iPhones. They are such dangerous surveillance devices. The issue isn’t that someone can intercept air tag locations. What is not actually understood is that every iPhone reports the presence of an air tag near it together with a compass direction. Obviously the phone has to report its location to identify where the air tag is, but beyond the level of wifi scanning, air tag scanning is much more precise within inches.
So if your iPhone is in motion, meaning on your person, a drone could aim a precision munition at you with extreme accuracy. The worst part about it is it works even when the iPhone is off. Now there are other mass surveillance threats such as client side scanning, big tech profiling, email collection, voice printing and more that I could address with solutions. But that’s something I can address in future videos.
Please subscribe for more content like this. This is a huge topic and I can only skim the surface in a 20 minutes video. I started a company to provide solutions to the average person instead of just talking about problems. Privacy is a changing battlefield and the approaches always change. But today the primary solution is still to use a deguggle phone. As I discussed in this video, it is immune from geofencing and also protects your identity since it does not have a Google id.
Check that out. These phones are around $400 so they are cheaper than normal phones. I explained in the video as well that a VPN protects you from mass surveillance and even hackers doing man in the middle attacks. They also protect your ip address. We have the BytesVPN service which I started a few years ago. We have worldwide coverage and a known entity providing the service. Me and my staff.
Hopefully someone you can trust. We have a Brax mail service that hides identity information from your email. We offer unlimited aliases, seven domains and webmail. Check that out for $50 a year. All these are on my store on Brax. Me sign up on there and you will not be asked for personal information to sign up like email. Thanks for watching and see you next time. .