During a time of high surveillance and government intrusion, you can reclaim your privacy and protect your personal information.

December 27, 2021

By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP

privacyPrivacy is interesting. It’s not a tangible thing, but it is measurable. You know when you have it, and when you don’t. The sad part is, a lot of the world has normalized government intrusion into the lives of private citizens with little resistance.

Each time privacy was chipped away, there was a fearful public safety issue behind it to rationalize why people should willingly compromise. And they do.

Registering large ticket items with the government such as homes, boats, cars, and guns. We were told this was to help in the event of theft, criminal use, or other legal dispute. But the question is, if this was important to the owners of the property, wouldn’t an insurance company manage to provide the same service?

Street cameras are supposed to offer a witness to robberies, vandalism, and of course traffic violations. Yet it’s mostly used as a scheme to get money and fines out of victimless behavior.

Routine traffic stops are being used as workarounds for due process of larger criminal activity.

TSA is a blatant violation of any sort of due process. As are sobriety checkpoints, for the same reason. How is simply being somewhere probable cause of anything? Being somewhere you have every right to be is not suspicious.

In this digital age, it’s become even easier to be tracked and monitored. This is what Edward Snowden’s revelations were all about: the elaborate expansion of the surveillance state under the guise of national security.

Now, there are interconnected agencies throughout the world collaborating with private corporations to get fully flushed out identifiers of everyone. They are tracking your location, your purchases, your movements, behaviors, your face and even your gait!

The drive to move toward a cashless society is all but sealing the deal on tracking each one of us. The extra nudge of a “coin shortage” in the US didn’t hurt.

FATCA is the US government colluding with banks around the world to monitor the financial goings of American “persons” (not just citizens).

Three major tech developments that go further than anyone in the developed world should tolerate:

  • China’s social credit score: You could never actually commit a single crime, and still have a low social credit score that could not only prevent you from qualifying for a loan or credit, but could also restrict your access to public works and travel. In fact, it could even extend to friends and family associated with you.

  • Utah’s digital driver license: It’s supposed to only have the information that would be on a physical driver license… for now. But think about what happens when you get pulled over. You’d have to unlock your phone and hand it over to the cops, which is tacit consent for them to look through it. Is carrying around a card really that insurmountably difficult that it needs to be digitized? I guess the same question could be asked about cash. Is it safer NOT to carry cash with you? Perhaps. Is it worth being tracked? Your call.

  • Sweden’s vaccine passport microchip: “The technology was pursued and implemented in earnest after Sweden’s government recently enacted new laws requiring citizens to produce vaccination proof on the spot in any gathering involving more than 100 people. According to France24, ‘Following that announcement, the number of people who got microchips inserted under their skin rose: around 6,000 people in Sweden have so far had a chip inserted in their hands.’ “Theoretically such a chip’s data storage could eventually be expanded to hold a huge range of identifying information, which brings up age-old questions of privacy and ease of surveillance by outside parties or hostile entities.”

There was an article that came out from Zerohedge that elaborated on all the different ways our privacy is still very much a victim of future technology and policies. So what do we do about all this?

The first question to ask is: what is within MY control?

You aren’t changing the system, the politicians, the overall agenda, or dismantling the surveillance state. Voting, writing your representatives, running for office… that’s not going to fix any of this. So realistically and for the immediate future, the solution has to be in how YOU navigate these waters.

Option 1: Go off the grid entirely. Just be careful where you do it. There are some places where you can own your land and still be in violation by living off grid. Check out Tyler Truitt from Huntsville, Alabama. He owned the land he was on, and built a house on it where he and his girlfriend lived off grid. He collected rain water, had solar panels, and his house was condemned by the city.

Option 2: This doesn’t solve for everything, especially when it comes to your biological identifiers, but it does leave a cold trail when it comes to some of your digital footprint.

  • Get a VPN subscription. While regulations do exist to prevent some digital tracking, a VPN (Virtual Private Network) hides your IP (Internet Protocol) address which means it hides your location from your ISP (Internet Service Provider), and subsequently from advertisers, data collectors, and the state.

  • Get an LLC. An LLC out of the right state in the US could provide quite a bit of cover. In some states, if your car is registered under an LLC, the traffic cameras won’t work and the city won’t issue the ticket. Your name isn’t associated with the property on the public register. So people can get mad at you, but cannot come for your car, house, or boat because they aren’t registered as your property.

Instead, in this very litigious and heavily surveilled world, on paper and digitally, your identity is obscured. Often (thought not always), the government and litigious people are looking for an easy target, not someone that will take a lot of work to find, much less someone who doesn’t have anything of value to their name.

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