Stash spots and safe houses are two ways to store incriminating materials. If incriminating materials are stored in a stash spot or safe house instead of in your home, they won't be found by an adversary in the event of a house raid or covert house search. A stash spot is a hidden place, often outdoors, that is unlikely to be stumbled upon. A safe house is a house, apartment, or other space that an adversary doesn't know you're using.
Stash spots and safe houses each have advantages and disadvantages:
- It is easier to set up a stash spot.
- It is easier to minimize DNA traces in a stash spot.
- It is easier to change the location of a stash spot.
- A safe house provides more storage space and can be used for purposes other than storage such as sleeping, preparing materials, etc.
Examples of stash spots include:
- A box buried in a wooded area far from a trail (so hikers don't risk stumbling upon it).
- A hidden place in an abandoned building tucked away somewhere.
Examples of safe houses include:
- A house, apartment, or other space rented with a fake ID and cash.
- The home of someone you trust and who is willing to take the risk this complicity entails, but who is far enough away from networks that are under surveillance.
If an adversary finds out about a stash spot or safe house, they can start monitoring it in order to identify you when you access it, as has happened in Italy, where motion-activated hunting cameras were installed to monitor a forest stash spot[1]. Because of this, when accessing a stash spot or safe house, you can:
- Practice anti-surveillance to counter the risk of physical surveillance.
- Dress anonymously to counter the risk of being observed or recorded.
- Practice tamper-evident preparation to ensure that the stash spot or safe house hasn't been accessed by an adversary.
Techniques addressed by this mitigation
| Name | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Covert house search | You can keep action materials that have no “legitimate” purpose in a stash spot or safe house, or at worst, let them pass through your home only for a very limited time. | |
| Covert surveillance devices | ||
| Video | You can keep action materials in a stash spot or safe house to avoid bringing them into your home, where covert video surveillance devices can be present. | |
| Forensics | ||
| Ballistics | An adversary needs to have access to a firearm to perform a ballistic analysis on the firearm. To prevent this, you can store the firearm in a stash spot or safe house. | |
| Trace evidence | An adversary can use trace evidence to link objects to an action site. To mitigate this, you can carefully plan the action so that after the action you store in a stash spot or safe house any tools that are too expensive to realistically discard after each action. | |
| House raid | You can keep action materials that have no “legitimate” purpose in a stash spot or safe house, or at worst, let them pass through your home only for a very limited time. | |