The surveillance infrastructure was built first. The awareness comes later — if it comes at all. This is the manual.
SLNT Faraday Bags: Go Dark Without Powering Down
Your phone doesn’t need to be hacked to betray you. It does it constantly, by design — broadcasting your location to cell towers, pinging Wi-Fi networks, advertising itself over Bluetooth, and responding to RFID readers. All of that happens whether you’re actively using it or not. Airplane mode helps. Powering off helps more. But neither is instant, neither is silent, and neither leaves you ready to use the phone the moment the threat window closes. ...
The $10/Month Privacy Stack That Covers Most People
The privacy industry wants you to think this is complicated. It isn’t. Most of the surveillance you’re exposed to daily can be neutralized for less than you spend on a streaming service. Here’s the stack. Exact tools, exact costs, no filler. DNS: NextDNS — $2/month Every website you visit starts with a DNS query — your device asking a resolver “what’s the IP for google.com?” By default that resolver is your ISP, and your ISP sells that data. NextDNS routes those queries over encrypted DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS, blocks trackers and ad networks at the DNS level before they ever load, and logs nothing you don’t explicitly tell it to. Install it on your router and every device on your network is covered. One config, everywhere. ...
What Is Five Eyes (And Why It Should Change Where You Store Your Data)
You’ve probably seen “outside Five Eyes jurisdiction” used as a selling point by privacy tools. Most people skip past it. They shouldn’t. It’s one of the most important phrases in the privacy space and almost nobody explains what it actually means. Here’s the full picture. The Short Version Five Eyes is an intelligence-sharing alliance between five English-speaking governments: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They share signals intelligence — intercepted communications, surveillance data, metadata — with each other freely and routinely. ...
Zero Day Living: Why I Started This Blog
They built the surveillance infrastructure first. Then they built the apps you love on top of it. By the time most people figured out what was happening, they were already ten years deep — every search, every location ping, every late-night anxiety spiral typed into a search bar, indexed and sold to the highest bidder. This isn’t conspiracy theory. This is the business model. Google’s entire existence is an advertising company that built a search engine to harvest intent data at scale. Facebook mapped the social graph of the entire human species and monetized it. Your ISP sells your browsing history. Your phone carrier sells your real-time location. Data brokers you’ve never heard of have files on you with hundreds of data points — your income bracket, your health conditions, your political leanings, your relationship status — compiled without your knowledge and sold without your consent. ...