Counter-Surveillance Resource Center

Ears and Eyes moves to the CSRC!

Posted on 2023/05/17 by darknights

Starting today, the Ears and Eyes project is now hosted by the Counter-Surveillance Resource Center (CSRC). The present website will not be updated anymore. The new address is:

https://csrc.link/earsandeyes

This new website has a modern design, is easier for us to update and brings advanced search features to our database, allowing you to filter and search through our 100 cases of surveillance devices hidden by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Feel free to check out CSRC’s other projects, including their database of resources on targeted surveillance and their Threat Library (a threat modeling tool for anarchists).

As usual, you can get in touch with us if you have feedback, criticisms or information to give us. We also welcome translations in any languages. You can now contact us at CSRC’s email address – csrc@riseup.net – or use our old address if you prefer.

Source: Ears and Eyes

The Guide to Peer-to-Peer, Encryption, and Tor: New Communication Infrastructure for Anarchists

Posted on 2023/03/26 by darknights

An exhaustive anarchist overview and guide to various apps and tech that utilize peer-to-peer and encryption.

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Secure encryption chat apps are essential infrastructure for anarchists, so they should be closely scrutinized. Signal is the dominant secure encryption tool used by anarchists today. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the fundamental architecture and development goals of Signal have potential security implications for anarchists. Signal is a centralized communication service, and centralization results in potential security implications, especially when contextualized within the current threat landscape. Alternative secure chat apps like Briar and Cwtch are Peer-to-peer communication tools that, in addition to being Encrypted like Signal, route all traffic through Tor (PET). This approach to secure communication offers great advantages for security, anonymity and privacy over more common services like Signal, but with caveats. However, anarchists should seriously consider trying and using Briar and/or Cwtch, in the interest of developing more resilient and more secure communication infrastructure.

Despite all that, the best way to communicate anything securely is still face-to-face.

Shhh…

This is a discussion about digital tools for communicating securely and privately. To begin, it must be stressed that a face-to-face meeting, out of sight of cameras and out of earshot from other people and devices, is the most secure way to communicate. Anarchists were going for walks to chat long before encrypted texting existed, and they should still do so now, whenever possible.

That being said, it’s undeniable that secure digital communication tools are now part of our anarchist infrastructure. Perhaps many of us rely on them more than we should, but there is an extent to which they have become unavoidable for coordinating, collaborating, and staying connected. Given that these tools are essential infrastructure for us, it’s crucial that we constantly scrutinize and re-evaluate their security and effectiveness at protecting our communications from our adversaries.

In the last decade or two, anarchists have been early adopters of these secure communication tools and techniques, and have played a role in normalizing and spreading their use within our own communities, as well as among others engaged in resistance and struggle. The following text is intended to present anarchists with newer tools for secure encrypted communication, and make the case that we should adopt them in order to bolster the resilience and autonomy of our infrastructure. We can learn the advantages of these new apps – how they can help dodge surveillance and repression – and subsequently employ them effectively in our movements and help spread their use more broadly. Continue reading “The Guide to Peer-to-Peer, Encryption, and Tor: New Communication Infrastructure for Anarchists” →

Strategies for Countering Police Access to DNA Data

Posted on 2023/03/23 - 2023/03/23 by darknights

Chapter 10: OPSEC for Informational Self-Determination

Source: Counter-Surveillance Resource Center

Via: Act for freedom now!

Languages: German

Download: PDF (read, A4 booklet, letter booklet) • TEXT

OPSEC is military and intelligence jargon for “operational security” and refers to techniques designed to prevent their people being caught during or after an “operation”.

The fact that we have to talk about such things at all when it comes to issues like exercising the fundamental right to freedom of assembly or small acts of civil disobedience is a clear indication of how far the state’s mania for security and collection has already developed. It is generally better to invest resources on pushing back the security apparatus than in a technical arms race with state agencies.

Nevertheless, there is of course nothing wrong with trying to avoid giving unnecessary material to state authorities and exercising the right to informational self-determination. To prevent or at least significantly limit leaving casual traces, it is necessary to wear new gloves, a face mask, a hair net or, even better, closed headgear (e.g. a swimming cap) and washed clothes with long sleeves and pant legs^[1]. Continue reading “Strategies for Countering Police Access to DNA Data” →

Who wrote that?

Posted on 2023/03/18 by darknights

2020

by Zündlumpen #76

Languages: German • English • French
Download: PDF (read, A4 booklet, letter booklet) • TEXT

A brief overview of modern forensic linguistics methods for determining authorship.

The following article tries to give an overview from a non-technical perspective and to make a corresponding evaluation. There are some academic publications on this topic that could be evaluated for a better assessment. However, my main purpose here is just to raise the issue, not to provide a sound and conclusive view so if you know anything more, publish it!

Avoiding traces that could be your undoing down the road – perhaps even after years or decades – is probably of interest to most people who occasionally commit a crime and come into conflict with the law. Avoiding fingerprints, avoiding DNA traces, avoiding shoe prints and textile fiber traces or at least disposing of clothing afterwards, avoiding surveillance cameras, avoiding tool traces, avoiding recordings of any kind, recognizing surveillance, etc. – all this should be a concern for anyone who commits crimes from time to time and wants to protect themselves from identification. But what about those traces that often arise only after a crime has been committed, out of the urge to explain one’s deed anonymously or even by using a recurring pseudonym? When writing and publishing a communiqué?

My impression is that in many cases no special attention is paid to these traces despite a rapid technological development of analytical capacities. This may be intentional, negligent, or a compromise of competing needs. Without wishing to make a general suggestion here on how to deal with these traces – after all, everyone must determine that for themselves – I would like to outline the methods the investigative authorities in Germany and elsewhere are currently (probably) working with, what seems possible in theory, and what could become possible in the future.

Perhaps I should note in advance that everything or at least most of what I present here is scientifically as well as legally controversial. I am also less interested in the legal validity of linguistic analyses – and not in the scientific one either – than in whether it seems plausible that these investigations could guide a surveillance effort, because even if a trail is not useful in court by itself, it could still lead to other, useful trails. Continue reading “Who wrote that?” →

France: Some initial notes on the investigation file against Ivan

Posted on 2023/01/25 - 2023/01/25 by darknights

The following information comes from an initial quick reading of the investigation file. Therefore, it is necessarily incomplete.

First of all, how did this investigation start?

The Anti-Terrorism Sub-Directorate (SDAT) of the judicial police began an investigation on its own initiative, at the beginning of January 2022, following “confidential information collected by [the] service” (in another document, a judge speaks of “anonymous intelligence”). The police “gathered” the names of two comrades who, according to this information, were likely to be responsible for the incendiary attacks, claimed by anarchists, which had been targeting vehicles in Paris and the surrounding area for years. In the past, different local police stations and the anti-terrorism group of the DPJ 1 (a section of the Parisian Judicial Police) had already carried out investigations, notably for “criminal association”, without success.

The National Division of Research and Surveillance (DNRS, which can be understood as the “operational unit” of the SDAT) set up an operation for tailing the two comrades. They planned to follow Ivan from January 10 to February 3, 2022, and the other person from January 17 to February 3. Concretely, this part of the file includes the statements of the DNRS agents who, in the morning, placed themselves in front of the homes of the two comrades and followed them (on foot or by car) in their movements, at work, photographed them at the supermarket, etc. It should be noted that they often lost sight of their “target” when the latter was moving on foot or by bicycle.

The second comrade was quickly cleared. The DNRS agents say that they saw and photographed Ivan putting up posters in Paris and Montreuil late in the evening of January 18. On the evening of January 21, they followed him again when he went to Paris. The comrade used his bike and the cops lost sight of him almost immediately. They then deployed four “surveillance devices” (cars come to mind). Suspecting that the comrade was still headed towards Montreuil, they placed them at four transportation corridors between Paris and this suburb. One of these “devices” recorded him on the commune of Montreuil (they lost sight of him immediately afterwards). The police used this as an indication that the comrade was responsible for the arson that occurred that night of a SFR van, in Montreuil, and of an Enedis vehicle in the twelfth Parisian district.

On February 23, the SDAT contacted the Bobigny court, which officially tasked it with investigating the comrade. Continue reading “France: Some initial notes on the investigation file against Ivan” →

To (try to) keep the cops at bay

Posted on 2021/09/21 by darknights

Source: Counter-Surveillance Resource Center

There are many guides out there that describe everything from the best ways of building timed incendiary devices, to dealing with DNA, to anti-forensic methods and how to secure digital information against search and seizure or government surveillance.

Some of them are over forty years old, others are newer, some of them still hold up while others need updating. We thought it wouldn’t hurt to have some suggestions, a brief “things to consider” article, that is reasonably up-to-date in regards to the enemy’s methods. Some lessons and experiences combined with technical info but in a format that hopefully doesn’t feel too rigid and authoritarian.

Sometimes it feels like there is a particularly repressive climate in the world or the region you live in but historically there is rarely more repression in one era than there is in another. The simple explanation is that the state is constantly waging war against its enemies, it is only more evident if one is affected by it directly or indirectly, as an individual, group or entire society. The exceptions may be situations such as world wars, but even then the mechanisms are different, and in our view it is usually possible to say that repression is constant. That is to say, it is not possible to think: I will be unaffected. Because sooner or later the spotlight will turn from yesterday’s enemy to you. Continue reading “To (try to) keep the cops at bay” →

Announcing the Counter-Surveillance Resource Center

Posted on 2021/07/22 - 2021/07/22 by darknights

Announcing the Counter-Surveillance Resource Center, an online hub for building a culture of resistance against surveillance.

Around the world, anarchists and other rebels are subject to surveillance due to our activities. Surveillance can be carried out by state institutions or other actors – for example, private investigators, fascists, mercenaries, and law-abiding citizens. Surveillance can be intended to disrupt our activities, make arrests, secure convictions or worse.

As technologies develop, some surveillance techniques stay the same, while others change to incorporate these emergent technologies. While cops still follow us in the streets and keep records about us in their archives, nowadays cameras are everywhere, drones fly overhead, and DNA forensics are sending many comrades to jail.

We felt there was a lack of collective tools to tackle these issues, so we created a website, the Counter-Surveillance Resource Center (CSRC). Our aim is to gather various resources in one place in order to help anarchists and other rebels fight the surveillance that is carried out against us. We want to encourage international collaboration, and we accept submissions in all languages.

How does one avoid leaving fingerprints and other traces during an action? How can we use computers and phones more safely? What should you do if you suspect that someone is an informant? How might one deal with the psychological consequences of clandestinity? How might one destroy cameras in the street? Is this thing you found on your car a GPS tracker? We want to answer these questions and more.

Feel free to send us submissions, translations or comments. Visit the website at: https://csrc.link