Mass surveillance: Mass digital surveillance

The Internet and digitization have reached many areas of life: financial transactions, biometric screening at borders, GPS tracking of smartphones, and “smart” streetlights. Combined with technological advances in storage capacity and processing power, this enables mass digital surveillance — the routine collection and analysis of vast amounts of data on everyone and everything for the needs of power.

See the digital surveillance topic.

Used in tactics: Deterrence, Incrimination

Mitigations

NameDescription
Avoiding self-incrimination

You should not store self-incriminating information on digital devices except for very deliberate reasons, such as writing and sending an action claim, and always through Tails.

Digital best practices

Tor[1] renders mass digital surveillance ineffective by anonymizing Internet use. If Tor is not an option, using a VPN also increases your privacy by routing your Internet traffic through privacy-oriented services instead of your Internet Service Provider. Open-source and security-oriented operating systems and applications limit the data they store or collect about you as much as possible.

Encryption

Encrypting “in motion” data renders the data unintelligible to observers at certain points on the network, such as State network monitoring centers.

References