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I have a good friend who is a former special forces soldier. We sat down to lunch a few days ago and he told me about a lot of the training that they go through.  Every special forces soldier gets millions of dollars worth of training making them best trained military soldiers to have ever walked on this planet.  He didn’t get into anything that he was prohibited from sharing, of course, but I was fascinated by some of the things he shared about surviving capture by an enemy and even torture.  There are two fundamental principles that keep soldiers, and anyone else, alive and strong through such an extreme experience: Following the rules and winning small mental victories.

Surviving Capture Rule #1: Follow The Rules

Whether captured by an opposing army, a brutal dictator, a rogue band of narco-terrorists, or some other hostile group, the first rule is to obey your captor.  They may or may not care about your survival, but they sure as heck aren’t going to keep you alive if you are a nuisance.  You are at their mercy and should do everything you can to get on their good side. Complying quickly with their orders is one of the best ways to do this.

They will inevitably have unfair and stupid rules.  Violating unfair and stupid rules could lead to severe punishment and maybe even death.  The endearing image of Steve McQueen tossing a baseball against the wall in solitary confinement in The Great Escape couldn’t be further from the truth.  In those kinds of dire circumstances staying alive by following the orders of your captors is the highest priority.

Surviving Capture Rule #2: Win Secret Mini-Battles

Your mental strength is the other essential element to surviving captivity.  Surviving physically might be worthless unless you survive mentally as well.

To avoid being broken down mentally you need to find ways to win secret battles against your captors.  Although not the best example, one of the POW’s imprisoned with John McCain found a way to sew images on the inside of his clothes to win a small victory against his captors.  Evey in V for Vendetta beat her “captors” and stayed mentally strong by reading the journal hidden in crack of her cell wall.  Secretly flipping your captor the bird while their back is turned can be another victory.  You did it, they didn’t see you do it, you win.

Why Should You Care?

There are very few of us who will be in a position like Elizabeth Smart, Aung San Suu Kyi, John McCain, or hostages of the FARC.  It is more likely that we might find ourselves traveling in a dictatorship or even living in a formerly free country that has succumbed to the principles of totalitarianism, where fundamental human rights are not respected by the government.

The world is full of countries that accept torture, order assassination of its citizens that are not even charged with a crime, defend institutionalized sexual assault, and humiliate innocent people by forcing public nudity.  North Koreans, for example, fell captive to their government and need to obey the ridiculous laws as strictly as they can to keep from being imprisoned or publicly executed.   People in these circumstances are captives and need to use the same tactics to survive both mentally and physically.  But if they are to survive mentally, they need to find small ways to win little secret victories against their captor.

Obeying Ridiculous Laws

Many laws are ridiculous.  If a law violates a fundamental human right, for example, it is ridiculous.  It might be better to obey a ridiculous law and suffer a little bit than experience  the greater suffering that might come from violating a law.  Violating the law gives captors an excuse to do terrible things, often with the support of the public who may be unsympathetic to people who violate the law.  Non-violent civil disobedience is still a common practice and, after exhaustion of all available legal remedies, may be a successful way to combat immoral laws.  Be prepared to pay the legal price for engaging in civil disobedience.

You Need Privacy To Win Little Victories

You cannot win little victories like Evey Hammond, or John McCain’s cell mate without privacy.  The tools and tactics of HowToVanish.com and the book How To Vanish are essential to helping you maintain privacy in case you might find yourself in one of the unfortunate situations of an oppressed citizen, traveler, or other captive.

If you encrypt a birthday message to your grandma, just so someone else can’t read it, you have won a small victory.  If you encrypt your grocery list, you have won a small victory.  If you shop anonymously with cash and don’t use an identifying shopper card to buy your groceries, you have won a small victory.  If you watch the latest episode of the Office over an encrypted VPN, you have won a small victory.  Burying a gold or silver coin in a place only you know about is a small victory.  These small victories will help you survive captivity both physically and mentally.

Conclusion

Stay alive and win small victories.  Use the legal tools and techniques from How to Vanish to do that.  If you haven’t already gotten your copy of the book How To Vanish, check it out so you have a whole arsenal of ways to win little victories.

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You think your work is crazy? I have a good friend who is a psychologist and her work literally is crazy. She deals with people who are not only mentally disturbed but a lot of them are dangerous too. She has to be very careful that one of her patients doesn’t find out where she lives.

Hot celebrities are always at risk of a celebrity stalker showing up at their house.  A hot psychologist has almost the same level of risk.  Unlike Ivanka Trump, this hot psychologists doesn’t  have a team of personal bodyguards protecting her from celebrity stalkers at all times. There are only women at her house and she is feisty but petite. Most people don’t have the same risk level as Ivanka or my friend, but I’m sure everyone knows someone who is vulnerable at home.

Fortunately, lawyers have magical powers to solve all kinds of problems. Double fortunately, I use my powers for good. Here are the most important things I have told my friend to do to reduce the risk from deranged fans.

Avoid Celebrity Stalkers By Being Hard To Look Up

Unlist your address and phone number from the phone book and other online and offline directories. This is always the first place stalkers will look. This includes keeping your social networking sites clean of anything that hints at addresses or phone numbers.

Rent your home or buy your residence using a trust or LLC. Remember not to name the trust or LLC anything that would identify you.

Don’t get utilities in your name. Use the name of a willing friend or in the name of a trust or LLC.

Don’t have any mail sent to your house in your name. Send mail to a PO box or another ghost address. If you do receive mail at home, make sure everything is addressed to your LLC. The same is true for FedEx, UPS and other couriers. Use a ghost address for all billing addresses.

Avoid Being Followed Home By Celebrity Stalkers

My friend works in an institutional setting where there are security guards and other staff members. At work she is relatively safe. She needs to take the most care when she is leaving work or any time she is out and about.

Situational Awareness – When going to your car, be aware of any people hanging around in the parking lot, any suspicious vehicles, vehicles with people waiting in them, or any cars that follow you out of the parking lot. One way to help throw anybody off the trail is to try and leave at a different time every day.

Take a different route home every day. Someone might be able to map your route home without overtly following you. They just watch you drive down the street for long as they can see you, then move to the point that you vanished the next day and repeat. If you take a different route home every day, it can be very difficult to reconstruct your map without following you.

If you do notice someone following you, do not keep going home. Turn and go in the exact opposite direction. Stop somewhere where you know people will be or go to a friends house who used to be a USC linebacker. You can also make executive protection training moves, like taking a racing corner, to increase your distance between you and your follower.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the things that anyone in my friend’s situation can do to protect themselves from being harassed by celebrity stalkers, patients, or raving fans.

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We have all done it. If you own a laptop then you have probably done it more than once. We have all been without the Internet for a little while and then decided to use the wireless network unprotected with cryptographic protocols from our neighbor, a business, or a stranger down the street to do a little web surfing.

But just because you have done it does not necessarily mean that you want others doing it to you. After all, some of those restaurants offered the Wifi access for free to entice you to be their patron while your neighbor may just be being nice.  But you may not trust others as much as you trust yourself.

For whatever reason you want to keep all strangers out of your network, just like you want them out of your financial business and may use a hawala system, and would help you to avoid private investigators.  This is how to keep your network secure from any prying eyes that may be around your neighborhood.

CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROTOCOLS

First, is to make sure that you pick the right encryption method for your network settings. The instruction manual with your wireless router should provide step by step instructions that are unique to each device.

There are several different cryptographic protocols that are available for someone running a home network. The choices are WPA, WPA II, and WEP. The WPA and WPA II are both the same standard and version II is slight more advanced than the regular version.  These are known to be the safest method of network encryption. They will keep your network reasonably safe against people that are trying to penetrate it.

If you have older hardware, instead of a new secure Linksys router, then you might go with WEP. This is not very secure but it is better than nothing. WEP is an older standard of cryptographic protocols. If it is at all possible then choose another method of encryption. You will be safer in the long run.

Second, is to make sure that your login information is very hard to guess. Your network key, as well as your router login information, should be very complicated. If they are easy to guess then this makes all of the other security that you have placed on your wireless network pointless. Do not use a password that is easily identifiable to you. This means do not use your dog, cat, or even children. All these things are something that a neighbor would know. Remember the easier your password is to guess then the less secure your network is.

CONCLUSION

Encrypting your wireless network with cryptographic protocols will keep unknown and unwanted individuals from using your assets and help you to protect your computer.  These methods will help keep you and your personal information safe and secured.  Then you can surf the Internet or setup storage devices, etc. with relative peace of mind knowing that they are not available to anyone who drives by with a laptop.  You can further protect your computer by using anonymous web surfing and other techniques and tools found in the book How To Vanish.

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These days many organizations offer free wireless network access for their customers in an effort to entice more people in the door. People love this and they will stay longer than usual at their favorite restaurant, cafe, bookstore or lounge. There is nothing better than to be able to surf the web on your laptop, as if you were at home, but at the same time still be in a social setting.  Many people also like to use the internet while they are temporarily on vacation away from their tax free states without risking a huge tax liability for doing so.

But there is one drawback to all of this free Internet that is floating around. It would be wise to take into serious consideration before you decide to logon how you are going to protect your personal information. You should make sure that you are able to surf the Internet from that cafe or restaurant freely and without fear of someone intercepting your data.

For example, you can use an SSH client to to run an encrypted session to a server that is outside of the network such as an encrypted proxy server like a hawala system. This will help protect your computer by giving anyone that is trying to do a man in the middle attack on your data merely a bunch of encoded characters. They will see data flowing through but they will be unable to decipher it. Additionally, when you surf the Internet your information is easy to read through data packets that go through the air. Encrypting this message will still allow the person to see data but but they will be unable to make any use of it.

Another example is to secure a web viewing session when you are on a strange network, such as through the use of a proxy program such as Tor. We call Tor a proxy but it is not one in the original sense. It allows you to safely and anonymously surf the Internet through different proxies but it can be very slow. This is the main reason more people do not use it. Sometimes, you just want to get on the network and get off right away. Tor does not let you do that. It is a little sluggish but it will help keep you secure and anonymous.

One more thing that you want to do when web surfing on a public network is to make sure that when you login to anything online is to make it is through an https connection. An https connection, is when you see a letter “s”, standing for secure, following the normal “http” that you see while you are web surfing. Often there is a small padlock indicating the secure session. This will allow you to have a safe, secure, encrypted session with the server. This is always important but especially more so when you are on a public network. Make sure you do this whenever logging into financial sites such as a bank account, Paypal or GoldMoney account.

CONCLUSION

These are a couple of ways that will help your know that your web session be secure while you are surfing via a public network. You can find even more in the book How To Vanish, Legally Protecting Your Personal and Financial Privacy.  Anyone around could be trying get your data.  Be sure to keep your guard up to protect your personal and financial privacy.

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When you first start surfing the Internet you will come across many sites that ask for you to signup. They may ask you for a quick, two second signup that consist of your password and email address. Or they may decide to ask you for a whole ton of extra information including your real name, home address, phone number, and other unique items that will easily identify you.

You will not join every site that asks you for this information but you will join enough that you soon will have an overabundance of passwords to remember.This is when people usually get lazy and start to use the same password at every site. This is a bad idea and there is software that can help you store your different passwords while at the same time keeping them safe, secure and encrypted.

If you use the same password on every site then what happens if one site is a nefarious operation, gets hacked, etc. and the individual, like a private investigator who should be avoided, who has access to your password then uses transactional databases to get your background information then you could be very vulnerable and perhaps become the subject of fraudulent identity documents. Use a hawala system for even greater privacy of financial transactions.  Once they are able to do that then they will have access to anything about you that is online. This breach of your personal privacy could lead to problems with your bank accounts, credit cards or brokerage accounts.

And even worse it can allow identity theft to take place on a massive scale. Identity theft will like cause major problems with your financial data and situation for months. So to be safe, the best thing for you to do, is to make sure you use a different password on every site. If you want to make it easier then you can use the same password on sites that are not important.

But you will have to remember to never use that password on any important sites. Important sites usually involve those of a financial or personal nature.  If you do not want the public to know about it then do not use the same password.

To avoid any problems, you should keep your passwords within encrypted software that you have to use a master password to access. This way, even if someone is able to get into your computer, they will not be able to get the passwords because they are encrypted. And it should be easy for you to remember the master password to get in the software. This will make your web surfing much secure for your personal information.

There are several programs available but they usually range from $30-50 each and vary depending on your operating system.  I have found the free encryption software True Crypt to be perfect for my needs because I do not have a significant amount of important usernames and passwords that need to be stored to protect your computer.  If you want to create a comprehensive plan for protecting your privacy, get the book How To Vanish.

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The Internet plays a large role in many people’s everyday activities from searching for movies to buying books, checking bank accounts or credit cards, sending email that lands your in transactional databases.  Everyday, the threat of hackers, phishers, and other types of scammers increase. With the use of the Internet and some readily available technology, they are able to trick you into loading their malicious software onto your computer.  You need to know how to protect your computer.

Some of these nefarious individual’s offers may be tempting, but you have to go by the old adage, “If it looks too good to be true, then it probably is.”  You have to be careful where you go while surfing the Internet so that you are able to avoid these pitfalls. There are many ways that you can avoid them so long as you are aware that they exist.  The vast majority of the time when you surf the Internet, probably 99% of the time, it will be a perfectly safe and enjoyable experience.

SIMPLE RULES

These rules are more applicable to people who use PCs because the Mac has less market share and the operating system is much more secure and therefore the despicable hackers, phishers and scammers tend to go for the low hanging fruit found on PCs with outdated software.  To make sure that it stays that way you can follow these sets of rules.

First, is to not download any attachments when it comes from your email. Even attachments that are sent by your friends should be scanned by an updated anti-virus program. Two major brands are Norton and McAfee.  Some email services, like Gmail, will do this automatically.  Your friend may have gotten the file from somewhere that was infected. If the person sending an attachment to you is a stranger or a business that you have never heard of before then avoid opening the attachment at all cost. There should be no reason that someone is sending you an unsolicited attachment.

Second, is always keep your anti-virus updated. Most new computers will come with an anti-virus already installed. Or you can decide to get the service from another vendor. No matter what you decide make sure that it is always updated. This means that you have to let it run and update everyday. There are new virus definitions that are always released so you have to let the anti-virus on your system know what they are. If you do not do this then your anti virus will not catch any newer viruses. This almost makes the anti-virus software useless.

Third, is to always have a firewall up on your system. This is extremely important. A firewall allows you to keep strangers from directly entering your computer without your knowledge. Hackers will probe different IP addresses to find vulnerable machines and systems. If you have a firewall active then your computer will be much less vulnerable. You can use a hardware firewall that comes with your router, for example I have a Linksys router and am extremely satisfied with its capabilities and ease of use, or if you are a little more creative then you can download a software version.

CONCLUSION

These few common sense rules of installing and keeping up to date anti-virus software, like Norton or McAfee, on your computer that is behind a firewall are just a few rules that will help you protect your computer.  This could help you avoid a private investigator and decrease your risk of your personal information being used to create fraudulent identification documents.  For even greater security consider anonymous web surfing through an encrypted proxy server which will add double the protect from two firewalls.  If you follow them, and other recommendation in the book How To Vanish, then your computing experience will be much safer and your personal and financial privacy will be much more secure.

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Best wishes,

Trace Mayer

Bill Rounds

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