Transportation by bike is the practice of using a bicycle instead of other modes of transportation.
Advantages of transportation by bike include:
- Bikes are harder to identify through video surveillance than cars: the make and model of a bike can be obscured and bikes usually have no license plates.
- It is harder for a mobile physical surveillance effort to follow a bike than a car or someone on foot, especially without being detected, and it is easier to conduct surveillance detection and anti-surveillance from a bike. For example, in a six-month physical surveillance operation against a comrade in France, the police regularly lost track of him while he was biking[1].
- There are far fewer places to install a tracking device on a bike than on a car, and when you search a bike, you can tell with a high degree of confidence whether a tracking device is present or not.
Techniques addressed by this mitigation
| Name | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Covert surveillance devices | ||
| Location | You can use a bike instead of any other type of vehicle: unlike other vehicles, when you conduct a bug search of a bike you can determine with a high degree of confidence whether or not a covert location surveillance device is installed on the bike. You should store the bike indoors to make it harder for an adversary to install a covert location surveillance device on it. | |
| Mass surveillance | ||
| Video surveillance | You can use a bike instead of any other type of vehicle: compared to other vehicles, a bike is much harder to identify on CCTV footage, especially if its distinguishing features are minimized. For example, you can use a different stolen bike for each action you carry out. | |
| Physical surveillance | ||
| Mobile | You can use a bike instead of any other type of vehicle: compared to other vehicles or people on foot, a bike is harder to follow by a mobile physical surveillance effort, especially without the effort being detected. | |