They’re Watching: Homeland Security Tracking Visitors Across Alternative News and Prepper Web Sites

Mac Slavo
March 21st, 2012
SHTFPlan.com

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

If there ever existed individuals and groups that threatened the status quo it’s now, and they can often be found congregating at alternative news web sites, forums and preparedness oriented online communities. Government officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have done everything in their power to marginalize their dangerous ideas and activities going so far as to even issue security bulletins to private businesses like banks, surplus stores, coffee shops and other retailers outlining what employees should look for and when to say something to law enforcement officials. Activities like putting a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car, paying cash, buying gold, stocking up on food, promoting “anti-U.S.” and “radical theologies,” and demanding personal privacy are all now considered to be suspicious in the eyes of a government hell bent on destroying the Constitution.

While DHS has requisitioned the help of brick and mortar businesses in their efforts to identify persons-of-interest, they have realized that the best place to locate domestic threats to national security is the internet. As such, they have deployed a host of tools to not only monitor what is being posted online, but who is posting it, who their friends are, which sites they visit and what information they ‘like’ in particular.

A recent report from well known survival author James Rawles suggests that Preparedness oriented web sites are a prime target of government snooping and sniffing. A web site like Rawles’ Survival Blog, or even our very own SHTFplan, undoubtedly meets all of the criteria outlined in the multitude of security bulletins issued by DHS and FBI, thus it would only make sense that these types of communities would be primary destinations for government monitoring. In the case of Survival Blog, Rawles reports that a recent analysis of his logs by web forensic experts yielded some startling results:

It has come to my attention that from August of 2011 to November of 2011, the FBI secretly redirected the web traffic of more than 10% of SurvivalBlog’s US visitors through CJIS, their sprawling data center situated on 900 acres, 10 miles from Clarksburg, West Virginia. There, the Feebees surreptitiously collected the IP addresses of my site visitors. In all, 4,906 of 35,494 selected connections ended up going to or through the FBI servers. (Note that this happened several months beforewe moved our primary server to Sweden.) Furthermore, we discovered that the FBI attached a long-lived cookie that allowed them to track the sites that readers subsequently visited. I suspect that the FBI has done the same to hundreds of other web sites. I find this situation totally abhorrent, and contrary to the letter of 4th Amendment as well as the intent of our Founding Fathers.

I recognize that I am making this announcement at the risk of losing some readers.So be it. But I felt compelled to tell my readers immediately, because it was the honorable and forthright course of action.

Working on my behalf, some volunteer web forensics experts dissected some cached version histories. (Just about everything is available on the Internet, and the footprints and cookie crumb trails that you leave are essentially there for a lifetime.) The volunteers found that the bulk of the FBI redirects were selected because of a reader’s association with “Intellectual Property” infringing sites like the now defunct Megaupload.  But once redirected, you were assigned a cookie.  However, some of these were direct connections to the SurvivalBlog site (around 4% of the total.) So if they had kept this practice up long enough and if you visited us enough times then the FBI’s computers would have given you a cookie. This has been verified with sniffer software.

Most alarming about this is that according to James Rawles’ analysis, users’ browsers were first redirected to an FBI server, then forced to download a cookie via their browser, and were then redirected back to his web site – the entire process unbeknownst to the end user because it happens almost instantly. Because the cookie isn’t removed unless you clear it from your browser (you can easily remove cookies manually) every web site subsequently visited by the user would then be logged by an FBI computer in real-time.

You can be assured that if the FBI is engaging in this type of surveillance, Survival Blog and other preparedness web sites aren’t alone. Chances are that, as Rawles mentions, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of web sites being tracked and monitored in similar fashion. A report from the Intel Hub confirms our suspicions, as do our own visitor logs, and we’d venture to guess that most other web sites in the alternative news sphere will see similar access logs.

Read More AT SHTFPlan.com

Considerations for SHTF Living & Bug Out Locations

By: Mac Slavo
May 3rd, 2011
SHTFplan.com

Editor’s note: If you are not yet in the location you want to be if the S were to hit the fan, and are currently looking for either a home or raw land, then we recommend that you also read What Is The Best Place To Live In The United States To Prepare For The Coming Economic. The opinions expressed below are a supplement to that article.

If insulating yourself from a worst-case scenario is your primary concern then the following considerations, some of which were mentioned in the article above, could help you to better decide what to do next:

Stay out of the cities:

This is without a doubt the top concern when looking at the possibility of an economic collapse or other disaster scenario. You’re likely better off taking your chances in the middle of the wilderness than you are staying in an urban center. You’ll be dealing with packs of wild animals in both scenarios, but at least you would have a chance at acquiring some food, water and shelter. Of course, we’re not recommending that you make the wilderness your bug-out plan, but rather, are pointing out that cities will be hit extremely hard, and millions of people will be in need of food, gas, clean water, medicine and other supplies. In an all-out collapse, similar to that described by James Rawles in his book Patriots, the grid would go down, transportation systems would come to a halt and urban areas, including suburban areas, would become war zones as individuals, gangs and clans would compete for the last remaining resources. When you think major city and SHTF, think Hurricane Katrina, but on a regionalized scale affecting tens of millions of people.

Don’t plan on living in the wild:

While the wilderness may seem like a much better option than the inner city or suburbia, you’re not the only one who’s thought of it. Only experienced outdoors men should even consider living in the wild as a primary back-up for a collapse event. Like the cities, it will only be a matter of time before competition for resources reaches a boiling point. Unless you’re one-hundred or more miles from any major human access points, you’re going to come across others who are looking for food, water, shelter, clothing and supplies. Depending on where you are in the country, the elements may become just as dangerous as gangs in the city. Without the proper equipment, you’d probably have a better chance of surviving an inner city meltdown then you would freezing temperatures in the north / north-west part of the US. If the wilderness is your plan, do you have a plan for staking and defending a piece of land for you and your family? And are you prepared to evade and/or deal with the golden horde that will eventually makes it way from the cities?

How close is your support network?:

If you plan on relocating, are family members and like-minded friends within a tank of gas to your new location? While an SHTF location 400 miles outside of a major city is a great idea, if your plan is to have just you and your immediate family of 2 to 5 people defending the land you may run into problems. Regardless of how many guns or how much ammo you have, coordinated attacks by gangs or the possibility of being overrun by those who managed to make it to rural areas should be a consideration. Also, looking at the location of your home town and the reality of coordinating with neighbors and city officials to stop non-residents from entering a particular area would be prudent. A support network on a familial and community level will be critical if you are near any population centers, even if your town is only made up of a few thousand people. Primarily, your immediate team is of the most concern – keeping 24 hour watch and working the land will be critical, and you’re going to need more than just a few people to do this effectively.

Location. Location. Location:

The above article pointed out that coastal areas could be deadly – for a number of reasons. If you’ve read any historical doomsday theories, you’re likely familiar with the statistic that some 90% of the world’s population lives within a hundred miles of an ocean. Bad news if the earth ever decides to sneeze. That, and the fact that those areas become major targets in the event of war or wide-scale terrorism. The east coast of the US, especially, would be dangerous simply because of the number of people. Even if you aren’t directly on the coast, golden horde migrations will overrun hundreds of thousands of acres of land during evacuations or panics. The west coast would experience similar effects. From the south, as the article mentions, there is the real possibility of mass migrations and violence – it’s no secret that certain lines of thoughts suggest the southern US belongs to Mexico – so be prepared for an onslaught if you are anywhere within several hundred miles of the southern border. During any such mass migrations, any easy to traverse land masses will be subject to disturbances and only those in remote or difficult to reach locations will go unscathed. If it even exists, the SHTF protection zones, in general, seem to be the central United States regions – this includes flat lands and mountainous regions, stretching from northern Texas up towards the Dakotas and west towards Idaho. Parts of northern California, Oregon and Washington also qualify. There is, of course, the possibility that some natural events – Yellowstone comes to mind – could wreck havoc, but other than that, the right piece of property in these areas could be your best bet to survive a whole host of end of America scenarios. This is not to say that areas outside of this zone are unsafe, as we are speaking more in regional generalities here. Ideally, you want to be out of the migration path of the horde, preferably on higher ground in the mountains, or a good distance from any major or high trafficked roadways if you’re living on flat land.One rule of thumb would be to look at how far away a major city is from your location. If tens of thousands of people live within a gas tank of that location, you can expect unfriendly visitors.

Read More At SHTFPlan.com