Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Dead Drops

In the Age of Paper (tm), dead drops were done by leaving an envelope in a place no one would look for it.  "Behind the hot water pipes, third washroom along, Victoria Station" as Monty Python put it.  Dead drops are the classic method for field operatives to contact each other.  Perhaps you're deep in Foreign Evil Empire doing contract social work.  Your contact at the company may leave something for you while you're not present and you show up later and retrieve the item.

Enter modern technology, of by and for people who might want to file share for various reasons.

This is not going to be good for communications when the SHTF.  Too insecure.  You don't have privacy, you have anonymity.  Until someone decides to plant a camera to ID everyone who goes to that USB connector sticking out of the wall.  

A better solution, if you need to contact someone is to write the file, encrypt it with Gnu-PG or similar, copy it to a thumb drive, and then drop the drive in an envelope or some other agreed way, somewhere your contact is likely to be the only one who gets it.  If someone else gets it, assuming they don't track it back to you, you've only lost the drive. 

A bulk order of flash drives might be reasonable prepping. 

4 comments:

  1. Cool.

    You can always use Stegonography, and post the pictures to your blog.

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  2. Is it actually wise to rely on a computer based means of communication for SHTF situations? Seems like power would be a concern. I would think you'd want to conserve energy then.

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  3. Xenocles - when I was thinking SHTF, I didn't mean everything was down, like a major disaster, nationwide EMP or society in collapse. I was thinking more along the lines of a samller thing. Perhaps the DHS starts rounding up "potential right-wing terrorists", confiscating "high capacity magazines" or something like that. Not full-blown collapse, just something where you might be trying to communicate with other folks without it going public.

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