Life off grid?

This page considers enthusiasm for living 'off grid', ie in a way that evades supposedly ubiquitous surveillance.

It covers -

• introduction
• action for life 'off grid'
• survivalism and surveillance

     introduction

UK 'Off Grid' polemicist Nick Rosen claimed in 2007 that

We live in the most watched-over society in Europe. Exposure, especially in The Observer, has done little to hold the state and private sector in check. Phone records have become police records ... and CCTV camera records are now fed into the automatic registration number computer. Credit and store-card records have become marketing records and our email addresses are points of entry for all sorts of crime and spam. It's time to fight back using all the legal means at our disposal. We need to duck under the radar of government surveillance, credit-checking agencies, internet and mobile phone companies or the DVLA.

Nicholas Carr responded to that expression of defeatism by commenting that

To go "off-grid" now, you pretty much have to turn yourself into a counterespionage operative, a secret agent living in a yurt and nibbling the bruised leaves of a discarded cabbage.

Cynics might add that wearing an alfoil beanie while gnawing on sundried roadkill and reading dystopian or chiliastic literature is also useful in ducking under the radar, although far less practical than agitating for law reform.

     action

Rosen's recommendations for action include -

• buying an 'untraceable' mobile phone - "Travel to a town you have never visited before, to an area with no CCTV cameras and ask a homeless person to buy a pay-as-you-go mobile phone for you. That way no shop will have your image on its CCTV. ... Or dispense with the phone altogether and return to the humble payphone, now the preserve of tourists and the super-poor. ... if you stick to your traceable phone, leave it switched off whenever possible to avoid having your movements tracked".
• safeguarding email and computer - "work out a private code with friends you want to communicate with" and use "sophisticated software that deletes all traces of your activities from your computer"
• "Be invisible to CCTV cameras", apparently to be achieved by avoiding precincts and wearing disguises
• "Stay off spam mailing lists" - "Each time you submit your email address to register for a new website, create a special address, either on a free webmail service or on your own email server so you have control over it. Then, if the company later sells your email address or loses it through poor security, you will know exactly who to blame"
• Prevent supermarkets knowing your shopping habits - "Swap your supermarket loyalty card with a friend or acquaintance every few months, after having cashed in any points you have accumulated" and "use cash more often - save your credit card for emergencies".
• Avoid utility companies' marketing departments - "Live off-grid, unplugged from the system with solar panels and rainwater harvesting. There are tens of thousands of people living without mains power, water or sewerage, in isolated cottages, behind hedgerows in caravans or in groups of yurts in country fields"
• Shop outside the system - "There are full-time scavengers living off food retrieved from supermarket bins, because vast amounts of produce are simply thrown away on the eve of their sell-by date. Another way to avoid buying food is to barter for it."

Rosen acknowledged "it may seem almost comical to go to these lengths" but claimed that consumers cannot trust business or government to "safeguard our data or use it ethically, so we must provide our own safeguards".

Surprisingly Rosen did not advocate adding 'noise' to the surveillance grid, so that people can hide in plain sight. Other pages of this site, for example, note that some consumers respond to intrusive questioning and corporate abuse of trust by obligingly supplying false data. One result is the databases populated with 99 year old female billionaires who live in Antactica, work as engineers and speak seven languages.

     survivalism and surveillance

Notions that everyone who is not skulking in a stormwater drain or hedgerow is subject to pervasive and effective surveillance - including monitoring by Echelon and tracking by RFIDs - feed into survivalism, a belief-system that encompasses 'end times' eschatology, racist paranoia about the US Federal Reserve Bank or the Trilateral Commission, paramilitary organisations and the virtues of being as one with nature.

'Direct action' by individuals such as the Unabomber and by paramilitary groups may in turn result in surveillance: paranoids sometimes have enemies (and get watched) because they behave in ways that are threatening. Going 'off grid' by refusing to pay taxes or engage with registration regimes and by use of mechanisms such as identity crime (eg subverting surveillance through false identity papers) is typically illegal, on occasion provoking a cycle of regulatory action and reaction that 'justifies' the claimed need to "duck under the radar"





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