Public service announcement for at-risk social media commentators

[Gordon Housworth]

Mexican nationals are taking enormous risks to fulfill a public safety role and to assume a public service announcement role from which Mexican newspapers have already been driven under pain of death.

To these valiant social media commentators, know that your weapons are primarily defensive in nature, and of those the best is building and maintaining your anonymity.

Please accept this as the briefest of handbooks to guide your actions:

Leaving aside random killings of social media posters, which can have the same paralyzing effect on others, the conservative view is to assume hostile monitoring of your list traffic.

Under that very real assumption, the Who (at least at the handle or online name level) and the What (content) is known to the hostile monitor. (Halcones are present online just as they are present in taxis or newstands.)

It is extremely likely that a victim’s total postings overtime (on any topic) has surrendered incremental bits of information sufficient to identify the author.

Know that spoofing messages from ‘new members’ could have been or can be sent to an author to draw out more data. (Spoofing occurs when a person falsifies data in order to masquerade as another and thereby gain an illegitimate advantage.)

At some point the accumated data along with halcone input (both online and off) completes a profile that can be targeted.

If the hostiles have access to the network, then they can most likely obtain the IP address of the computer and even the aliasing of the handle to full name and address.

I have made the following recommendation to multiple list members but feel that the list needs the guidelines:

·       Add new handle (online name) unrelated to your current handle/online name.

·       Consider adding that new handle on a different network. (Moving location is the first rule of breaking hostile surveillance.)

·       Use that new handle only, only, for your own public safety monitoring/alert sharing.

·       Do not share that handle, do not advertize that you have another handle. (Someone can earn money by turning you.)

·       Continue your usual posting on your old handle. (When an old handle drops and a new one appears handling the same traffic, it is not hard to connect dots.)

·       Be terse in the new handle, or at least do not use idiomatic language that you use on the old handle, i.e., try to remove identifiable language.

·       Remember to be thoughtful about what and how you report or discuss criminal matters, i.e., if you say, “I saw X” then someone knows that you were in range to see X at that time.

·       Consider using services outside Mexico such as twitter.

·       Avoid creating identifiable patterns.

There are other steps but the above is enough to occupy most civilians.

These are survival rules. We call it tradecraft. Do not deviate carelessly.

As a model, Monterrey has established a citizen watch group (Centro de Integracion Ciudadana, telephone 01 800 838 8080 or (81) 83 78 0000, http://www.cic.mx/cic/) sponsored and funded by some of the big money elements in Monterrey - by the Group of Ten [Grupo de los Diez, leaders representing Monterrey’s largest industrial and financial conglomerates.

Buenas suerte a todos.