At 6 a.m. on Friday, I wake up, fumble for my alarm, and roll out of bed. As I walk to the kitchen to brew coffee, I think to myself: I am a cipher. I exist nowhere. My enemies could not find me, even if they tried. These thoughts come to me not because I fell asleep watching The Bourne Identity or took too much NyQuil before bed, but because I’m psyching myself up for a very difficult assignment.
For the next 24 hours, I’m going to try to live completely surveillance-free. I will foil Chinese hackers and the NSA with encrypted texts and VPN tunnels. I will find ways to buy things online without giving away any personal information and communicate via smartphone without producing metadata. Also, I will wear a funny-looking hat with small lightbulbs in it that will protect me from being caught on camera. With expert help and a spy’s toolkit, I will attempt to stick to my normal routine for an entire day, but without leaving behind a trail of data for the government – or anyone else – to collect.
I got this idea a few weeks ago, when some friends and I were talking about what Edward Snowden’s leaks concerning the NSA’s PRISM program meant for the future of privacy. Now that we know that the government can access our phone records and snoop on our e-mails, our Facebook messages, and our Google searches, will any digital interactions ever feel private again? Is it even worth thinking about life outside the panopticon?
Years ago, people who asked these questions might have been written off as tinfoil-hat nutters. But now, even normal people have reasons to be paranoid. If you're an investigative journalist, a corporate executive working on a sensitive deal, a member of a targeted ethnicity, religious group, or political faction, or merely a citizen who puts a high value on privacy, you're probably already worried about the extent to which you're being snooped on. In a recent poll, roughly half of Americans said that the NSA’s data-collection efforts violated their rights. And as technologies like Google Glass become widespread, the pool of interactions that aren't captured and catalogued — by private companies, the government, or both — will shrink even more.
Last week, after a proposal to defund the PRISM program narrowly failed in the House of Representatives, I decided to test the borders of the surveillance state, by trying to leave it for a day. Several friends pointed out that I could simply go camping in the woods without my gadgets, or become Amish. But my goal is to make my surveillance-free day a relatively normal one. I don't want to wear disguises, change my name, and live on the lam, as Evan Ratliff did for his 2009 Wired story. I want to get online, check e-mail and Twitter, use a smartphone, eat meals at restaurants, buy things at stores, and take public transportation, just like I would on any other day. I want to see if it’s possible to maintain some semblance of personal privacy without time-warping to 1950 (or 1650).
I begin my project by shutting off all the technology in my house that automatically collects or sends out data about me. It’s a horrifyingly long list. I can’t use my Jawbone Up band, which wakes me up, tracks my sleep, and counts the number of steps I take every day. I have to switch my iPhone to airplane mode, turn my iPad and my Kindle off completely, and unplug my Xbox, since it's connected to my home wi-fi network. Just to be safe, I also cover the cameras on my laptop, desktop, and cell phone with snippets of electrical tape, since savvy hackers can gain control of them remotely.
So, after my morning coffee, I start surveillance-proofing my biggest problem spots: my laptop and cell phone. Every day, these two devices transmit millions of data points about me — where I am, who I’m talking to, what I’m shopping for, which animated gifs I’m looking at — to an armada of private-sector companies and third-party marketers. Usually, I accept these leaks as the cost of living a digital life. But today, I’m going to try to tighten the information spigot.
Hundreds of programs and apps have sprung up in the last few years to help people keep their data out of unwanted hands, and when I was planning my surveillance-free day, I enlisted the help of two cyber-security experts to help me sort through them all: Jon Callas and Gary Miliefsky. Jon is a professional cryptographer and the co-founder of a company called Silent Circle, which makes a suite of software that allows you to send and receive encrypted calls and texts. Gary is the executive producer of Cyber Defense Magazine, and the founder of a company called SnoopWall, which makes a suite of apps that prevent cyber-spying and eavesdropping.
The first thing both Jon and Gary told me is that if my goal was complete anonymity and totally untraceable communication, I was certain to fail. They suggested I set my sights lower — shrinking my surveillance footprint, instead of eliminating it.
“Are you going to be completely invisible from the U.S. government?” Gary said. “Never. But you can make it painful for them to find you.”
On their advice, I download Wickr, an app that allows you to send and receive encrypted texts and photos that self-destruct after minutes or hours of viewing. (It’s basically Snapchat on steroids.) I also sign up for a site called HideMyAss. It’s a private VPN service that is popular with the anti-surveillance crowd, since it allows you to camouflage your web activity by sending it through a network of thousands of proxy servers scattered around the world. I'm in the Bay Area, but with HideMyAss, I can make it look like I’m logging on from Brazil or Bangladesh.
