Anti-surveillance

No Trace Project > Threat Library > Mitigations > Anti-surveillance

Anti-surveillance is the practice of taking active measures to evade (“shake off”) a mobile physical surveillance effort.

There are two, and only two, scenarios in which you should conduct anti-surveillance:

• If you are on the move to conduct an activity that you don't want an adversary to observe, and you have no indication that you are being followed, you can conduct anti-surveillance to evade a potential surveillance effort that could be following you. The goal of conducting anti-surveillance in this scenario is to minimize the risk of being followed when you conduct the planned activity.
• If you have an indication that you are being followed, and you suspect that the surveillance effort is planning to take immediate violent action against you (e.g., arrest or attack you), you can conduct anti-surveillance. The goal of conducting anti-surveillance in this scenario is to avoid the suspected violent action.

You should not conduct anti-surveillance in other scenarios because:

• If you are on the move to conduct an activity that you don't want an adversary to observe, but you have an indication that you are being followed, you would not be able to conclusively determine that the anti-surveillance measures you took successfully allowed you to evade the surveillance effort. Therefore, you would cancel the planned activity in any case, making anti-surveillance useless.
• If you have an indication that you are being followed, but you don't suspect that the surveillance effort is planning to take immediate violent action against you, conducting anti-surveillance would reveal to the surveillance effort that you know they are following you, which could push the adversary to adapt and be more discreet, which you want to avoid.

A core principle of anti-surveillance is that, usually, a surveillance effort really doesn't want to be detected by its target, and would rather lose its target than risk detection. Because of this, most anti-surveillance measures you take should attempt to provoke one of two situations: either the surveillance operators expose themselves in a way that you can detect, or they lose you. You should remain observant while taking an anti-surveillance measure, so that you can detect operators who have exposed themselves because of the measure.

Anti-surveillance is an advanced practice. Before conducting anti-surveillance, we recommend that you read up on it using the links at the end of this description. That said, examples of anti-surveillance include:

• Entering a “blind spot” of a surveillance effort, that is, a space where they lose sight of you, and then conducting a series of evasive maneuvers, all the while attempting to detect surveillance operators. For example, if you are on foot in a city, you can enter a crowded public building, quickly exit through a back door, and then conduct more evasive maneuvers. If you notice people rushing to enter the building after you, or looking for you on the street after you exit the building, they may be surveillance operators.
• Moving from an open area, where a surveillance effort needs to stay far away from you to avoid detection, to a less open area, where the surveillance effort needs to come closer to you to avoid losing you, all the while attempting to detect surveillance operators. For example, if you are on a bike in a rural area, you can move from a road where you can see far ahead and behind you to a small forest path, then accelerate, go deep into the forest, and come out of the forest far from where you entered, in a place that a surveillance effort would not expect. If you notice people acting strangely as you enter or exit the forest, they may be surveillance operators.

If an adversary notices that you are conducting anti-surveillance, they may adapt and become more discreet. Therefore, when conducting anti-surveillance, you should avoid revealing that you are doing so, if possible.

See the physical surveillance topic.

Techniques addressed by this mitigation