Anonymous dress is the practice of wearing clothing with two goals in mind: to hide your body features, and to ensure that the clothing itself cannot be used to identify you.
To hide your body features, you can:
- To hide your face: wear a mask that adequately covers your face, including your eyebrows and up to the top of your nose.
- To hide the rest of your body: wear a shirt with long sleeves, gloves, pants with long legs, and high socks.
- To hide your skin color: make sure no skin is visible, including around your eyes, at the junction of your shirt and gloves, and at the junction of your pants and socks.
- To hide your body shape and gait: wear baggy clothing (you can also conceal your gait with biometric concealment).
To ensure that clothing used during an action cannot be used to identify you, you can:
- Anonymously purchase two sets of clothing specifically for the action, “civilian clothing” and “action clothing”:
- Civilian clothing is clothing that is normal to wear in public. It can include items that hide your body features as long as it isn't suspicious (e.g., a hat, a “Covid” mask).
- Action clothing is clothing that adequately hides your body features, as described above.
- Far away from the action site, change from your regular clothing into the civilian clothing, in a suitable place where there are no surveillance cameras or witnesses.
- Close to the action site, change into the action clothing (in a suitable place).
- Perform the action.
- Close to the action site, change back into the civilian clothing (in a suitable place).
- Far away from the action site, change back into your regular clothing (in a suitable place).
- Dispose of the civilian clothing and the action clothing safely.
A specific form of anonymous dress is the “black bloc” tactic, in which a large number of people at a demonstration all dress as similarly as possible, typically in black, so as to be indistinguishable from one another.
Techniques addressed by this mitigation
| Name | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Forensics | ||
| Facial recognition | You can wear a wear a mask that adequately covers your face, including your eyebrows and up to the top of your nose. | |
| Gait recognition | You can wear baggy clothing to conceal your gait. | |
| Trace evidence | An adversary can use trace evidence from clothing (e.g., textile fibers detaching from clothing into the environment) to establish links between people, clothing, and places. To mitigate this, you can dress anonymously. | |
| Mass surveillance | ||
| Civilian snitches | You can dress anonymously to prevent civilians from providing a description of you that would be valuable to an adversary. | |
| Video surveillance | You can dress anonymously to prevent an adversary from identifying you from CCTV footage. | |
| Physical surveillance | ||
| Aerial | If you are being followed by an aerial surveillance effort, you can change into anonymous clothing when you are in a location that is not visible from the air to help prevent the aerial surveillance effort from re-establishing contact with you when you emerge into an open area (this won't work if the surveillance effort is also observing you on the ground). | |
| Overt | You can dress anonymously at a demonstration or other event to make it harder for an overt surveillance effort to identify you. | |