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What to do when the world comes apart? Well, you’re going to do as well as you prepared for it. One of the things that should be taken into consideration is either a BO (Bug-Out) location or a temporary hide site. Either way, for the winter months there are some preparations that need to be taken, and in a certain way.

Combine Cache Points for the SHTF Retreat

The most important point that the reader must understand is DO NOT CACHE ALL OF THIS IN ONE PLACE! Everybody wants that “central location,” because everything is “there,” and it takes less time than making three or four different points. No, belay that thought, helmsman! Staggering it makes it more likely that some creeps will not get the whole treasure-trove. Same with all of the cached stuff such as food, medicine, etc. Bust it up into “thirds” and put it in three different places that you can find, but are not equidistant from one another. If you place all three in an equilateral triangle configuration, the way man’s mind thinks when he’s searching is to look along those “organized” lines.

Protect Your Caches from the Hordes with These 8 Considerations

Whatever your BO location is (a cabin, shack, or semi-permanent structure) there are some factors that need to be considered, especially for these winter months. Be it a cabin, tepee, or permanent lean-to on someone’s land with permission…whatever the scenario, here’s what you need:

The Perfect Spot: Because caches are the ultimate backup plan, you want to find an ideal location before you begin hiding your gear. Keep OPSEC in mind when you are finding your cache sight.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This and That Vol. 4–Mid Winter Musings

January 16, 2018

THIS AND THAT VOL 4 – MID WINTER MUSINGS

Probably the one topic Mrs. Cog and I return to more often than any other is our amazement how so many people who profess awareness and understanding of the coming chaos and hard times remain firmly rooted in their present situation. Despite acknowledging the runaway train barreling down the tracks directly towards them, they do little to nothing to get out of the way.

They know they are dependent upon a failing state for most, if not all, of their needs. Whether it is food, water, sewer, electricity, security, employment, whatever area we wish to examine, they remain tragically dependent upon a failing state to ‘not fail’ in order to continue to provide what the failing state soon will be unable to supply.

The thing is, there is no particular reason we can point towards as the reason for remaining shipwrecked and locked in the winter ice, slowly crushed by the ever thickening, shifting, grinding mass surrounding us.

This is not to say one can escape in totality from the insanity. There remains no ‘new world’ to travel to for a fresh start. Or at least none that is conveniently located within two miles of a grocery store, mall, movie theater, schools, Home Depot and Starbucks.

And therein is the rub and possible the central reason why people simply won’t get off the tracks. The railway we lay upon leads directly to all the conveniences so many of us take for granted that they are no longer wants, but bleeding needs.

We are so thoroughly entangled by and dependent upon our consumer culture that it is unthinkable to voluntarily withdraw from what we believe nurtures and sustain us. We are main-lining our own poison in every way imaginable and it’s killing us softly.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Edward Snowden’s New App Uses Your Smartphone to Physically Guard Your Laptop

December 23, 2017

Illustration: The Intercept

EDWARD SNOWDEN’S NEW APP USES YOUR SMARTPHONE TO PHYSICALLY GUARD YOUR LAPTOP

LIKE MANY OTHER journalists, activists, and software developers I know, I carry my laptop everywhere while I’m traveling. It contains sensitive information; messaging app conversations, email, password databases, encryption keys, unreleased work, web browsers logged into various accounts, and so on. My disk is encrypted, but all it takes to bypass this protection is for an attacker — a malicious hotel housekeeper, or “evil maid,” for example — to spend a few minutes physically tampering with it without my knowledge. If I come back and continue to use my compromised computer, the attacker could gain access to everything.

Edward Snowden and his friends have a solution. The NSA whistleblower and a team of collaborators have been working on a new open source Android app called Haven that you install on a spare smartphone, turning the device into a sort of sentry to watch over your laptop. Haven uses the smartphone’s many sensors — microphone, motion detector, light detector, and cameras — to monitor the room for changes, and it logs everything it notices. The first public beta version of Haven has officially been released; it’s available in the Play Store and on F-Droid, an open source app store for Android.

Snowden is helping to develop the software through a project he leads at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which receives funding from The Intercept’s parent company. I sit on the FPF board with Snowden, am an FPF founder, and lent some help developing the app, including through nine months of testing. With that noted, I’ll be forthright about the product’s flaws below, and have solicited input for this article from people not involved in the project.

Also collaborating on Haven is the Guardian Project, a global collective of mobile security app developers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Is Money? (Yes, We’re Talking About Bitcoin)

December 7, 2017

What Is Money? (Yes, We’re Talking About Bitcoin)

Good ideas don’t require force. That describes the Internet, mobile telephony and cryptocurrencies.

What is money? We all assume we know, because money is a commonplace feature of everyday life. Money is what we earn and exchange for goods and services. Everyone thinks the money they’re familiar with is the only possible system of money—until they run across an entirely different system of money.

Then they realize money is a social construct, a confluence of social consensus and political force– what we agree to use as money, and what our government mandates we use as money under threat of punishment.

We assume that our monetary system is much like a Law of Nature: since it’s ubiquitous, it must be the only possible system.

But there are no financial Laws of Nature for money. In the past, notched sticks served as money. In other non-Western cultures, giant stone disks (rai, a traditional form of money on the island of Yap) and even salt served as money.

In our experience, 1) money is issued by a government or central bank (i.e. a currency), and each of these currencies is the sole form of legal money (legal tender) in the nation-state that issues the currency; 2) each of these currencies is available in physical coins and paper bills and digitally as entries in bank and credit card accounts; 3) our currency is borrowed into existence by the central bank or by fractional reserve lending in private banks, and 4) this currency meets all of the utility traditionally required of money:

1. It is divisible into smaller units, i.e. a dollar is divided into quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies, or it is a small unit (for example, the Japanese yen, which is roughly equivalent to a U.S. penny).

2. It is secure, i.e. everyone can’t just print or make their own in unlimited quantities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How to Protect Yourself Online, No Matter Your Security Needs

November 13, 2017

How to Protect Yourself Online, No Matter Your Security Needs

Find a balance between security and convenience that is appropriate for your life.

Almost every week, it seems that there is some kind of major security breach. Whether celebrity nudes, the social security numbers of the majority of Americans, or a Bitcoin heist, it seems that our private data is under constant attack.

The Internet and your co-workers are full of advice: put a sticker over your webcam, disable Flash/Java in your browser, encrypt your drives, delete your Facebook account, cover your hand while using the ATM, get a burner phone, pay for everything with cash, start wearing a tinfoil hat to protect against the NSA’s spy rays, etc.

The reality is that as more and more of our lives become digital, information security becomes increasingly important. Many bad things can happen when your privacy is breached: from finding out that you have a boat loan that you didn’t know about to having your naked photos all over the web to being thrown in jail because the government doesn’t approve what you have to say. It’s important to take appropriate measures to protect yourself, but what is appropriate for you really depends on the kind of secrets you have to keep and the kinds of threats you need to protect against.

Let’s consider three people who care about their privacy, and steps they should take to keep their stuff private:

Lisa Monroe

Lisa Monroe lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She is a college student with a part-time job. She just got her first credit card, and just started going steady with a boyfriend.

To keep her private photos private, Lisa only sends them using Snapchat.

Lisa doesn’t have many secrets to keep, but she is worried about fraud to her credit and debit cards and the naughty pics she trades with her boyfriend Brad.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rules And Dangers When Organizing Security And Survival Groups

May 1, 2017

Rules And Dangers When Organizing Security And Survival Groups

For many years I have argued that the single most important preparation any person can make if they are concerned about future social or economic instability is the preparation of community building. It is the one thing that everyone needs for survival, and unfortunately, it is the one thing even many preparedness “experts” ignore.

When I talk about “community,” I am talking about groups in many forms. Sometimes a community is merely a small collection of families or neighbors; sometimes it is an entire town or county. Sometimes it is built around a local church, sometimes it is rooted in an already functioning political activism meet-up. Regardless of the size of your community, the people who are organized within a group for mutual aid, defense and trade are light years ahead of everyone else when it comes to survival. In fact, if a national crisis scenario escalates to the point of the disappearance of the rule of law, I would say that those without community will scramble to find one or probably die.

That said, there are right ways and wrong ways to go about organizing. There are also guidelines and hard rules to follow if you want your community to be an advantage rather than an obstacle. I have had the opportunity over the years to see many preparedness groups and organizations in action. I have gleaned knowledge from their successes, and also their numerous failures. I have also had the privilege of coordinating a preparedness group in my local area which has been active for the past three and a half years. So, I am speaking from personal experience when it comes to this process.

Here is what I have learned so far…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cataclysm

April 25, 2017

Cataclysm

Collapse generally comes as a surprise, even to those who predict it.

The USSR didn’t just fail one day, as does a person who dies of a sudden heart attack or stroke. It was more like a wasting illness brought on by an unhealthy lifestyle. A physician tells a morbidly obese patient: “Your daily consumption of twelve cocktails, three packs of cigarettes, and 4,000 calories, and your refusal to engage in exercise more strenuous than walking to the refrigerator will kill you, but I can’t say when.” For both individuals and governments, certain choices are incompatible with continued existence, and the Soviet government made plenty of those.

Very few people foresaw its failure when it was imminent, even purported experts. The small group who said Soviet communism wouldn’t work because it couldn’t work were disparaged right up until it didn’t work. However, the deck is always stacked in favor of those predicting this or that government will fail. Ultimately they all do because they all come to rest on a foundation of coercion and fraud, which doesn’t work because it can’t work.

There is both a quantitative and qualitative calculus for individuals subject to a government: what the government takes versus what individuals get back. Government is a protection racket: turn over your money and it promises physical security from invasion and crime, and adjudication and restitution in the event of civil or criminal wrongs. The quantitative calculus: am I getting more back than I put in? The qualitative calculus: what activities and people does the government help or hinder?

Protection rackets are often indistinguishable from extortion rackets, the “protector” a bigger threat to the “protected” than the threats against which they’re supposedly protected. Such is the case with the US government, as it was with the former Soviet government.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Human Rights Risks of Encryption ‘Back Doors’

February 27, 2016

The Human Rights Risks of Encryption ‘Back Doors’

a katz / Shutterstock

One fact that has received little attention in the current encryption debate is that many categories of individuals rely on strong encryption for their own security. These include sexual and gender-based rights activists, domestic violence victims, journalists and their sources, and human rights defenders. Strong encryption is necessary to protect fundamental human rights; as one technologist puts it, encryption saves lives.

Encryption, a process of scrambling communications to make them private, is frequently discussed simply as a privacy issue. But the same process that keeps banks’ communications secure is also, for many, a safeguard of many human rights including the right to life. For those who rely on secure communications in sensitive situations, the issue goes far beyond privacy.

Experts agree that “secure back doors”—which would give law enforcement secret access to digital storage or communications—are scientifically impossible. That explains the uproar over a federal magistrate judge’s recent decision ordering Apple to create a backdoor to an iPhone. On Feb. 25, Apple moved to vacate that decision and warned that the FBI is seeking a “dangerous power” in the case.

Back doors are wholly unnecessary for security. Law enforcement agencies already use hacking tools to track electronic communications and circumvent encryption. Information-sharing programs reportedly exist with intelligence agencies, which use keyloggers to record encrypted messages before they are sent. National Security Agency (NSA) supercomputers can even number-crunch to break some encoded messages. And encryption does not shield the “to” and “from” lines of messages—also known as metadata. The problem is not a lack of tools, but intelligence failures in analyzing existing information—perhaps one reason former NSA head Michael Hayden rejects the FBI’s position on back doors.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Upgrade Your iPhone Passcode to Defeat the FBI’s Backdoor Strategy

February 22, 2016

UPGRADE YOUR IPHONE PASSCODE TO DEFEAT THE FBI’S BACKDOOR STRATEGY

YESTERDAY, APPLE CEO TIM COOK published an open letter opposing a court order to build the FBI a “backdoor” for the iPhone.

Cook wrote that the backdoor, which removes limitations on how often an attacker can incorrectly guess an iPhone passcode, would set a dangerous precedent and “would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession,” even though in this instance, the FBI is seeking to unlock a single iPhone belonging to one of the killers in a 14-victim mass shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, in December.

It’s true that ordering Apple to develop the backdoor will fundamentally undermine iPhone security, as Cook and other digital security advocates have argued. But it’s possible for individual iPhone users to protect themselves from government snooping by setting strong passcodes on their phones — passcodes the FBI would not be able to unlock even if it gets its iPhone backdoor.

The technical details of how the iPhone encrypts data, and how the FBI might circumvent this protection, are complex and convoluted, and are being thoroughly explored elsewhere on the internet. What I’m going to focus on here is how ordinary iPhone users can protect themselves.

The short version: If you’re worried about governments trying to access your phone, set your iPhone up with a random, 11-digit numeric passcode. What follows is an explanation of why that will protect you and how to actually do it.

If it sounds outlandish to worry about government agents trying to crack into your phone, consider that when you travel internationally, agents at the airport or other border crossings can seize, search, and temporarily retain your digital devices — even without any grounds for suspicion. And while a local police officer can’t search your iPhone without a warrant, cops have used their own digital devices to get search warrants within 15 minutes, as a Supreme Court opinion recently noted.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Congress Declaring War on ISIS…or on You?

February 1, 2016

Is Congress Declaring War on ISIS…or on You?

Passage of Senator Mitch McConnell’s authorization for war against ISIS will not only lead to perpetual US wars across the globe, it will also endanger our civil and economic liberties. The measure allows the president to place troops anywhere he determines ISIS is operating. Therefore, it could be used to justify using military force against United States citizens on US territory. It may even be used to justify imposing martial law in America.

The President does not have to deploy the US military to turn America into a militarized police state, however. He can use his unlimited authority to expand programs that turn local police forces into adjuncts of the US military, and send them increasing amounts of military equipment. Using the threat of ISIS to justify increased police militarization will be enthusiastically supported by police unions, local officials, and, of course, politically-powerful defense contractors. The only opposition will come from citizens whose rights have been violated by a militarized police force that views the people as the enemy.

Even though there is no evidence that the government’s mass surveillance programs have prevented even a single terrorist attack, we are still continuously lectured about how we must sacrifice our liberty for security. The cries for the government to take more of our privacy will grow louder as the war party and its allies in the media continue to hype the threat of terrorism. A president armed with the authority to do whatever it takes to stop ISIS will no doubt heed these calls for new restrictions on our privacy.

Following last year’s mass shooting in California, President Obama called for restricting the Second Amendment rights of any American on the “terrorist watch list.” The president also used the attacks to expand the unconstitutional gun background check system via executive action.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Illusion of Freedom

December 29, 2015

The Illusion of Freedom

A campaign rally last week in Michigan. In the current presidential contest, a frustrated white working class has been receptive to anti-democracy messages. (Carlos Osorio / AP)

The seizure of political and economic power by corporations is unassailable. Who funds and manages our elections? Who writes our legislation and laws? Who determines our defense policies and vast military expenditures? Who is in charge of the Department of the Interior? The Department of Homeland Security? Our intelligence agencies? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? The Department of Labor? The Federal Reserve? The mass media? Our systems of entertainment? Our prisons and schools? Who determines our trade and environmental policies? Who imposes austerity on the public while enabling the looting of the U.S. Treasury and the tax boycott by Wall Street? Who criminalizes dissent?

A disenfranchised white working class vents its lust for fascism at Trump campaign rallies. Naive liberals, who think they can mount effective resistance within the embrace of the Democratic Party, rally around the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who knows that the military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. Both the working class and the liberals will be sold out. Our rights and opinions do not matter. We have surrendered to our own form of wehrwirtschaft. We do not count within the political process.

This truth, emotionally difficult to accept, violates our conception of ourselves as a free, democratic people. It shatters our vision of ourselves as a nation embodying superior virtues and endowed with the responsibility to serve as a beacon of light to the world. It takes from us the “right” to impose our fictitious virtues on others by violence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NATO Expansion: Lessons Not Learned

December 17, 2015

NATO Expansion: Lessons Not Learned

Failure to Communicate

Recently, NATO extended an offer of membership to Montenegro. The announcement was couched in the usual tagline of offering “assurance” to Western Balkan states concerned with possible security issues (Russian assertiveness) and “reassurance” to current NATO members in the neighborhood. With the utmost respect to Montenegrins and other newer NATO entrants, it seems that they are not expected to reciprocate and offer assurance or reassurance to NATO in turn, which really means the United States. Yet, reciprocity is one of the hallmarks of any successful alliance. The idea that the U.S. considers Montenegro an ally worth risking further deterioration of US-Russian relations in the wake of Ukraine, Syria, the Sinai air disaster, the Paris bombings, and recent Turkish actions is quite idiotic.

Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 should have taught NATO the possible dangers of over-extension. The latter episode in particular should have been quite instructive (to NATO as well as the EU) as to the need for dialogue between major powers before actions to be taken which might be perceived as infringing upon the security interests of other involved parties. Relentless expansion of one’s own sphere of influence while denying a corresponding sphere of influence and concomitant security interests to one’s counterpart reeks of hubris, stupidity, and miscalculation, the usual tragic precursors to war in the past.

Security Architecture and Infrastructure Crumbling

Two hundred years ago at the Congress of Vienna, the major powers of the day agreed to form an equilibrium of sorts which was intended to reduce the chance of a major European war re-occurring. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Great Britain, and France came to an understanding which in essence stated that if any one of the powers took actions which infringed upon the security interests of another state, it would potentially face consequences from the remaining powers as well.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If You Want Security, Pursue Liberty

December 15, 2015

If You Want Security, Pursue Liberty

Judging by his prime-time speech last week, the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency will be marked by increased militarism abroad and authoritarianism at home. The centerpiece of the president’s speech was his demand for a new law forbidding anyone on the federal government’s terrorist watch list from purchasing a firearm. There has never been a mass shooter who was on the terrorist watch list, so this proposal will not increase security. However, it will decrease liberty.

Federal officials can have an American citizen placed on the terrorist watch list based solely on their suspicions that the individual might be involved in terrorist activity. Individuals placed on the list are not informed that they have been labeled as suspected terrorists, much less given an opportunity to challenge that designation, until a Transportation Security Administration agent stops them from boarding a plane.

Individuals can be placed on the list if their Facebook or Twitter posts seem “suspicious” to a federal agent. You can also be placed on the list if your behavior somehow suggests that you are a “representative” of a terrorist group (even if you have no associations with any terrorist organizations). Individuals can even be put on the list because the FBI wants to interview them about friends or family members!

Thousands of Americans, including several members of Congress and many employees of the Department of Homeland Security, have been mistakenly placed on the terrorist watch list. Some Americans are placed on the list because they happen to have the same names as terrorist suspects. Those mistakenly placed on the terrorist watch list must go through a lengthy “redress” process to clear their names.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fourth Turning–Our Rendezvous With Destiny

November 30, 2015

FOURTH TURNING – OUR RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY

We are now in the seventh year of this Fourth Turning. A famous quote from the seventh year of the last Fourth Turning portended the desperate, bloody and ultimately heroic trials and tribulations which awaited generations of our ancestors. What will be our rendezvous with destiny?

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt – June 27, 1936 – Philadelphia, PA

Our Rendezvous With Destiny

“The seasons of time offer no guarantees. For modern societies, no less than for all forms of life, transformative change is discontinuous. For what seems an eternity, history goes nowhere – and then it suddenly flings us forward across some vast chaos that defies any mortal effort to plan our way there. The Fourth Turning will try our souls – and the saecular rhythm tells us that much will depend on how we face up to that trial. The saeculum does not reveal whether the story will have a happy ending, but it does tell us how and when our choices will make a difference.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The people have been permitting a small cadre of elitists, billionaire financiers, corporate chiefs, propagandist media moguls, and crooked politicians to make the choices dictating the path of our country since the 2008 dawn of this Fourth Turning. The choices they have made and continue to make have imperiled the world and guaranteed a far more calamitous outcome as we attempt to navigate through the trials and tribulations ahead. Their strategy to “save the country” by saving bankers, while selling the plan to the public as beneficial to all and essential to saving our economic system, has proven to be nothing more than the greatest wealth transfer scheme in human history. The ruling class is deliberately blind to their own venality and capacity for evil.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A.

November 25, 2015

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A.

I recently took a little trip into the past and deep into America’s distant war zones to write a piece I called “It’s a $cam.” It was, for me, an eye-opening journey into those long-gone years of American “nation-building” and “reconstruction” in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mind you, I still remembered some of what had been reported at the time like the “urine-soaked” police academy built in Baghdad by an American private contractor with taxpayer dollars. But it was the cumulative effect of it all that now struck me — one damning report after another that made it clear Washington was incapable of building or rebuilding anything whatsoever. There were all those poorly constructed or unfinished military barracks, police stations, and outposts for the new national security forces the U.S. military was so eagerly “standing up” in both countries. There were the unfinished or miserably constructed schools, training centers, and “roads to nowhere.” There were those local militaries and police forces whose ranks were heavily populated by “ghost soldiers.” There was that shiny new U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan that cost $25 million and no one wanted or would ever use. It was, in short, a litany of fiascoes and disasters that never seemed to end.

Financially, Washington had invested sums in both countries that far exceeded the Marshall Plan, which so successfully put Western Europe back on its feet after World War II. Yet Iraq and Afghanistan were left on their knees amid a carnival of corruption and misspent taxpayer money. What made revisiting this spectacle so stunning wasn’t just the inability of the U.S. military, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and a crew of crony warrior corporations raking in the big bucks to do anything right, but that this was the United States of America.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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