 I present Mr. No Name here speaking on real-world privacy, so here we go, without further ado. Alright, thank you guys for showing up. We've seen a lot of talks out there where people are going, you know, hey, you don't have any privacy, you know, we've all heard the Scott McNeely deal, privacy is dead, blah, blah, blah. I got sort of tired of that, and I also got tired of a lot of the talks that said, hey, here's 20 different ways I can go get all your data. Sort of at the converse to that, which is how you can hide, sort of the idea here. So what we're going to be talking about today is not a why talk. If you need to know why you need to be private, you're in the wrong talk. There's a whole bunch of them later today. By the way, this entire presentation is on the CD. We're going to be going very quick. If you need this as reference, go look at it on the CD. Key principle in being private is if you don't have the information, if it doesn't exist, it can't be used. So part of the whole idea here on being private is don't leave information out there. That's going to be on your cell phone records, that's going to be on your Visa records, it's going to be things, paying cash, some of the obvious, some of the not so obvious here. Privacy has a monetary cost, and that's something that we all have to acknowledge today. We want to be private, yet at the same time, we want to reduce the cost. We all have our Safely cards and our Vons cards. We all want to have cable TV or use Tivo or use our cell phones. There's a cost associated with that. Sometimes it's a privacy cost where your information is out there. Sometimes it's a direct cost, and here we have to understand that. Sometimes we are going to end up paying a higher cost for our groceries. Sometimes we're not going to get the free things, such as the Best Buy rebates on the latest laptop. We have to take that into consideration. And as we go through, you have to make that decision. Is it worth the monetary cost? So if I make this phone call, turn on my cell phone in Vegas, is it worth the cost? And that's not just a monetary cost of going over to the pay phone. Then there's the privacy cost associated with it as well. Before we start thinking about protecting a privacy, ask yourself these things. What information is it that you're trying to protect? Is it where you work? Are you afraid that somebody's out to get you and they're going to stalk you back to your workplace? And then what can you do to hide that information? But you have to ask yourself some fundamental questions as we get into the privacy discussion. It's very easy to say, yeah, I'll just pay cash for everything. But then what is it that you're actually trying to hide by paying cash? I ask yourself these questions that you see on the screen. And then you ask yourself, who is it that's going to be chasing you down? Is it Big Brother? Is it the government? My favorite is the random target of opportunity. You're out there driving along and somebody just says, I'm going to target that guy for identity theft, your privacy is sort of gone if that happens. But ask yourself those questions of what is it you're trying to protect and who is it that you're trying to protect from? Obviously, we all have that fear of Big Brother and the federal government. Be aware that the federal government today is outsourced a lot of that function to the private sector. So as we go through and they say, oh well, I just won't tell the government this information. Great, they're going to call Visa and find out all your records. We'll go to some of the data clearinghouses which they've been doing on a regular basis these days and getting that information there. So it may not be the same who that you're really afraid of that may be somebody else. This is more in the threat from the consumer business, where the marketers are really looking to build up that complete profile of you. And most of us here today are giving that profile away for free. We're not thinking about it, where we drive, how much we make, et cetera, et cetera. Hopefully at the end of this talk you're going to walk away with some ideas about how you can reduce your footprint, how you can leave those fewer bread crumbs in life. Who do you trust? This is a favorite. As we go through and you hand your Visa card to the server, do you trust the server with your information? Do you trust Visa with your information? You tell the doctor that, yeah, you were down in Tijuana and you had a great weekend, but you know, you've got these unusual aches and pains. Great, you trust the doctor, do you trust everybody that the doctor trusts? What about their administrative assistant? How far is that information going to go? Are you aware of how far that information is going to go? Trust is the reliance on something in the future. I hope that somebody's not going to betray that information. That's hard. I really appreciate the guys at DEF CON when they don't collect the information. Notice how you pay cash when you register. There's no information collected. You can't be subpoenaed. There's no trust breakdown that can take place. What is the level of privacy that you're trying to achieve? When you go through this exercise, great, it's easy to pay cash, but then you whip out your cell phone and you start talking. You've leaked information out the cell phone, but you've given up the cash and you said, gee, I protected my financial information. So what level are you trying to achieve? The PO box example is great. Great, nobody knows where you live, but to get the PO box according to United States Postal Service Regulations, you've got to give up additional information. That could be a problem for you. Sometimes it's a compromise, sometimes it's not. Oops, okay. You did a great job. You've hidden all your information from everybody, but oops, you had to go to the emergency room. You were drugged up and you gave your real name, your real address, you paid with a Visa card. What are you going to do about it? You can achieve a level of privacy, but then you may need to reset depending on what actually takes place in the future. If you've accidentally leaked out your home address somewhere and you've got somebody stalking you, seriously consider moving. As we go through some of the examples, if you FedEx delivered a package to your house and you're using your real name, Bingo. On the PI, I'm going to go out and we're going to chase that information down. You would have to move. This talk has broken up into three different sections here. We have daily life, stuff happens, and then I've got some stuff at the end, more life references and some things to think about. This is sort of how-to going through your life and how you can be private. Let's talk a little bit about some trade-offs here. Obviously, using a grocery discount card, real name that you filled it out with, you pay by check, credit card, it can be traced back to you. You go to using a grocery card, but you put it in a fake name. Maybe you trade with your buddies. Maybe every month when you go to the grocery store, every time you go to the grocery store, you get a new card. My favorite is you walk in and you say, what's your phone number? Hey, can you just use your card? Yeah, sure. Your information is not being recorded there when you pay cash. Certainly, you have video surveillance. I don't want to go quite all into that. But essentially, from a cash transaction standpoint, you pay cash but you still get the discount. There's some ways around being anonymous. Some other examples here. Some other things in your daily life we're going to hit on here. Identification. That's the subject for me. Because your name, everybody wants to know your name. If you have a unique name, it's really tough. If you come from a foreign environment, it's a lot tougher because chances are you're not going to have a, quote, American name. Or if you have an American name and you're living over in India, you're going to stick out like a sore thumb. The name is one of the big keys to the whole thing. Sure, social security number works. Data birth can work. It all starts there with the name. It's pretty easy. Use your passport as the means of primary identification. We don't think about passport as the means of identification unless we're out traveling. But your passport does not have the same information that your driver's license has. When you walk into a bar, they scan. They do the magnetic strip scan and your driver's license. They're not going to do that with a passport. A passport, you don't know where you live. You don't know your home address. You do have your date of birth on there because it is identification. There is the scan strip at the bottom. Most places don't have that. It makes for a lot better identification. The other thing, and this is part privacy part, what can you do to minimize your footprint is getting rid of your social security number from your wallet. Certainly we've all learned not to keep our card with us, I hope. But if you have a medical card and a lot of companies still as of last year were issuing your social security number as your ID, physically cut it out. If you lose your wallet and you have your social security number in there, the headaches have just multiplied. Physically cut it out. You have a nice little hole in your card, but it's still valid. You go in and you register like, what's this? Well, I cut my number out, here's what it is. If you use an alias, and I do recommend many aliases for many different purposes, don't use this alias as an intent to defraud. This is not a defraud speech. This is simply a privacy speech. You can go around most times when you go to check in at a hotel, like here, not staying at this hotel, I was staying in, said, you know, I need ID and I paid cash and they didn't ask me for ID. Register under a different name. If they're going to ask for photo ID, ask why they need that photo ID. Because the photo ID may not correlate to the name that you gave them. There's certainly a lot of places where you can go up and you can ask where do you actually need my photo? Or are you going to ask me for an ID? Because if they're not going to ask you for an ID, why give me your real name? Limited liability companies are a subject unto themselves. I want to just touch on them briefly. You can use an LLC as a substitute for yourself. When you're buying cars, real estate, another real property, having a checking account, you can have that in the name of an LLC. I'll have some references at the end on some ideas on where you can go to get LLC information. Spending money is pretty easy. Well, you think it's pretty easy. Yeah, you'll just pay cash for everything. You can also use cashier's checks. But if you're ordering via mail order, money order works, exchanging money, this was fine. I went to go exchange money one time and they said, what's your name? I said, are you going to ask me for ID? No, Bob Smith. And the guy looked at me like I was nuts, but why should I give you real name if you don't need a real name on something? LLCs on your checks is a good idea as well. Proxy agent, and this is sort of a common theme as we go through this discussion. A lot of folks really don't care about privacy. Find those people. And again, because you can use them all over the place. You can use them to make the purchase for you. You can use them to write a check for you. You can use them, if they say live in New York, to go make that item, you know, purchase that item in person for you and then mail it back to you. Disposable credit cards, you know, we've heard they're not really a privacy thing, they're more of an anti-fraud item. Things to avoid, obviously, are credit cards. Debit cards are a lot of ways worse because the amount that I can drain from my credit card account if I have them. Wire transfers are a real headache. And not too many people do these days, but there's very strong ID requirements, especially for international wire transfers. Moving large amounts of money is also a challenge. We'll get to that in a couple of slides. Credit cards are tough because not only do they conduct the actual transaction, but if you read all the fine print on your credit card, you're going to find out that stores, and I found this out once, you can actually get your home address, your mailing address from the credit card issuer. So it's no longer like a cash transaction, you have to not think of it like a cash transaction because now all of a sudden, they're getting more information from you, more information than you thought. So if, you know, next time you shop at a jewelry store, you know, and you pay the credit card and all of a sudden you start getting jewelry store flyers, a little tip off there. You can also trace where the person goes. It's great when you see somebody's credit card, they're going to stamp everywhere they've been around the city. Not really a good idea if you're looking to hide, or just be private. Concerns about spending cash, cash, as I said earlier, is great. We all think, yeah, just spend cash, but there are certainly concerns, and you need to think about how you're going to handle those. Plain tickets, you pay cash, you're going to go get flagged. So there's a trade-off there. Do you want your visa record to be flagged? Do you want your person to get flagged at the airport? Car rentals are a real bugger. I've tried this many times. And cash, you end up giving them a lot more information than you might think. Having your sewer numbers on cash recorded because they think it's counterfeit. I don't know. Think about what happens when you make large cash transactions and carrying around large amounts of cash. In the U.S., there are legal issues in spending a lot of cash. We've all known about the $10,000 limit. There's a couple of others. When you buy the monetary instruments between $3,000 and $10,000, let's say that you want to buy a car and the guy says, you know, just give me a cashier's check. And you go get a $5,000 cashier's check. That gets recorded. There's also a thing called the suspicious activity report. And banks are these days very gun-shy and very willing to fill these things out if they think anything suspicious comes along. Large monetary transactions raise money. To spend money, you need to get it. And I'll let you guys review this one on your own time. Where are you going to get your money? Is it a bank? Are they recording you? Can you do things via non-cash transaction? We're essentially, you know, you do a barter system. You know, will your employer give you something like a computer instead of giving you a check if you're working as a consultant? And then, can you trust your financial institution? These days, you really can't. They want to be your friend. They want your money. But can you actually trust them? No. And Lexus Nexus is sort of interesting. They've got this anti-money laundering solution where, you know, you buy it and they correlate all your records for you and goes, this guy, money laundering. Not exactly something that I'd be, you know, running to the bank and say, yeah, here, here's all my records. Some of the things about money, passwords on your accounts, et cetera, et cetera. If you have a lower profile, if you're not getting the credit card statements, if they're not sending you the pre-approved checks with your credit card, you're having a lower profile. And being private, it has a low profile. You shouldn't be getting a whole lot of solicitation in your mailbox, a lot of junk mail. The idea is to maintain a very low profile, checking your credit report, blah, blah, blah. Lastly, what is on your check? Certainly not all of us have got LLC set up. Can we do things to minimize the footprint on our check to make sure that the information's not leaking out? If I'm a retail outlet and I write a check, there's a lot of information that's on a lot of checks these days, can you just go by first name? Can you just have Mrs. Smith on your check? Lastly on this cash-dash thing, it's happened before where guys were cash people and they had a large cash-dash, and now they sell the house and 20 years later, the new owners bulldoze the wall and find a large cash-dash. Maybe include that as part of your will. So let's see you go out and you go by a set of wheels. Buying wheels is a big problem, especially a new set, because the amount of information they want to give you. Maybe you can have your LLC by the car instead. That way it's in the LLC's name, the LLC is doing the insurance on it, it goes to the LLC's address. It's not necessarily associated with you. When you buy a car, you may need to be asked, you may be asked depending on what state you're in for additional information. I think it's pretty bogus, but if it's a large cash transaction, the car dealership needs to give the information back to the federal agents to ask for that. Private-party auto purchases work great, because again, they just want the money. They're just willing to sign over the title. As long as they've got the money, they don't care who you are. It's pretty easy. Again, on the pre-approved loans, it's a bit of a bugger. Maybe you can do some things like barter, trade cars, have your friend cough up the money. Lexus Nexus allows the ability to look up a license plate and then map it back to a physical address. So next time you get somebody off in traffic, ask yourself, are they going to record my license plate and come after me? This has happened in the past. This has certainly happened in California where I live, and people have been stalked. One more thing about parking in the garage, if your car is not visible, that's a good thing. I've actually had somebody come looking for me and my car was in the driveway at the time. They recognized my car. They happened to know the general town I was in. They were 17 years old with way too much time on their hands. And they found me. I wasn't too happy. So if you have the ability to park your car in the garage, auto insurance is tough with cars too because there's a requirement out there every state. The insurer wants to know where the actual car is. If your car burns down in somebody else's garage and they come back and they find that you aren't living there, you know what, you may have some problems because they may not pay that claim. So are you willing to take that chance? I don't know. Maybe again, another chance for the LLC. Can you self-insure the car? That's another option. Or can you piggyback off of somebody else's policy? Again, using the proxy agent here is a good idea. You know, maybe it's your mom, maybe it's your dad, maybe it's your wife who doesn't care. Your wife might be a bad idea here. Maybe it's a good friend. Piggyback, proxy agent. Transportation's got other issues too. The on-star system tracking you. You know, we've all been bored. We've all poked around and maybe other people's home directories when we were being in Sis-Admin see what's out there. So with on-star, they can flip on the microphone and hear what you're saying in the car. Yeah, again, a bit of a problem. If you don't need it, don't use it. Pull it out. The O-Bag black box recorder is recording the last five seconds of your activity being used against you in courts of law. Possibly now insurance agents aren't willing to pay claims because they'll go ahead and analyze the date on the black box and say, hey, you were driving 85 miles now and we're not going to pay the claim. Part of that ties into usage-based auto insurance now where they're tying GPS systems, recording how many miles you actually drive. Have to read the fine print. Ask the questions. Here's some of the threats on-star using to track bank robbers, talking about way of automobile tracking. There's issues. If you want to be private, maybe you don't have a car. When I live in New York City, it's a great deal because there's a taxi. I just take a taxi every place, pay cash. There's no tracking. No must, no fuss. You also have the issue of tolls. Now, when I live in London, the congestion zone out there, their privacy policy claims that they only keep the data for 24 hours. They take a picture of your license plate, bill your credit card or your pre-approved bank account. Do you believe them? We'll see time and time again that this data is kept for way longer than 24 hours in violation of their policy. Maybe not their policy, but other people's policies. Backup tape, they forget, you know, backups don't run and the cleanup program doesn't run. The data lives on and on and on. Certainly the other fast pass tolls in New York, Denver, I know there's L.A. has got one. These things all can be used. They can be used not only on the highway, but you can also set up things to track people all over town. Do you need one? Pay cash. Taxi, as I mentioned, is pretty cool, but there's issues possibly with taxis. When you pay cash, it's a better idea. You know, on the bus metro train system, when I take the California's effort around, you know, can I pay cash for the ticket? When I take the metro in D.C., pay cash for the ticket. If I get a one day, one week, there's long-term logging potential. You want everything to be single use, a single transaction. When you travel in the United States, when you go, I don't know how many of you got the dreaded SSSS on your ticket, you're off to secondary. Is that a bad thing? I don't know. You know, they're not linking my name to the secondary search. When I go through secondary and they go through all my closing and batteries and all the other electronics, is that a threat to my privacy? I'm not sure. You know, if I'm concerned that the screeners are going to laugh at what color shoes or underwear I have, perhaps. In the big picture, for me, at least that's not a big deal. You have trust to traveler. You can also not use your name when you travel. Yes, you guys cannot use your real name. It's pretty amazing. First initial, middle initial, middle name. You can misspell your name. All these things work, and they're actually pretty effective. Again, if you slay that to your frequent flyer card, it sort of doesn't matter. Defeats the purpose, right? What about paying cash for your airline ticket? There's some ways around it. You use travel agents. You can use proxy agents. Those of you that flew in this week from internationally, you know, and may have participated in our nice fingerprinting program at the airport. Some things to think about. Maybe you can go through and utilize some of our other borders that don't have that problem. So who do you believe on the information? Some quick slides about, you know, we really don't provide information to the government. We don't leak it. And then we see Northwest leaking their information. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we actually did leak it. But then you hear the Air Travel Association say, no, we will not voluntarily turn the data over. And a few months later, well, yeah, we actually did. Who do you trust? When you rent cars, it's a challenge. And the best thing I can recommend is use a proxy agent or don't rent cars. Because the amount of information they want when you don't use a credit card. When you live someplace, it's another challenge because chances are when you rent an apartment, they want it in your name and you buy a house. It goes in your name, those sorts of things. Perhaps you just rent a room. If you're trying to hide, most of the time if you go just do, you know, a room for rent, they're not going to do a big background check on you. They're not going to, you know, ask for photo ID, those sorts of things. Use a cash deposit. Sometimes they, you know, are looking for, hey, now I'm going to be, you know, you're going to be in here for six months and you say, hey, well I'll pay six months up front. Chances are they're not going to be looking for a credit check. It's pretty, if you can afford that sort of thing. Maybe you can borrow that money from somebody else. You can also share services. Utilities are a favorite place for private investigators and others to get information. If you can share trash service, gable service, wear legal, lawn service, milk delivery with your neighbors, have your neighbors pay for it, say, look, you know, I'll pay 60% if it goes in your name. Or even do you need all of these services? Those are some other things to consider. How well do you know your roommates? Do you trust them? Certainly roommates can violate your privacy like no other. They're already in your house. They can invite people into your house. Those are things to consider. Police will check utility records when they're trying to track you down. And when I live in San Francisco, I hear this all the time on the police scanner. Utilities came back with Jim Bob lives at 555 8th Street. Private eyes routinely use this information. And property records are public information as well. So if you own property in your name, it's very easy to track that down. It used to be a lot harder because you had to go to the county or the parish where that information resided. Of course, now all that information is online. Delivery companies are keeping a database of where you live. And they don't use this necessarily for law enforcement purposes, but if Jim Bob gets a package and it goes to the wrong address, they may have a better idea of where he actually was supposed to be going or where that package was supposed to be going. Now, a lot of people have access to that information. Never piss off your neighbors. This is good for you. This is good for your neighbors. Neighbors can certainly call the cops and say, hey, I think there's a weed farm in this guy's basement. They can really make your life hell. And the best thing to do is either ignore your neighbors or bake them lots of cookies. You also have things like neighborhood directories and how many people think your neighbors actually shred the neighborhood directory that has your name, your address, your phone number, your email, your hobbies, maybe where you've lived in the past. All that information tends to be on the Homeland Association website or whatnot. Yeah, not really a good idea. Now, we also watch the news every once in a while and we see, oh yeah, Steve, he's a real kind of suspicious guy. He had a lot of computers in his basement. I could easily see him being the guy who murdered his neighbor. You're building up that profile. And the idea here is to lessen your profile. The repairman, I think it was late last year, there was a guy, a cis admin out in Virginia, and he invited his air conditioning repairman into his house in the afternoon the feds came and paid him a visit. A lot of the repair folks have been given instructions or given advice by the FBI, hey, please help us find terrorists, report anything suspicious you see in people's houses. This goes to delivery people. This goes to repairman. This goes to a lot of different folks. Some of these folks are actually acting on that tip and playing big brother, walking around your house, seeing what's there, reporting it to the feds. The feds come and pay you a visit. Trash. If you shred it, you're in better shape. If you never get the information in the first place, you're in the best shape. When you get those pre-approved checks, if you never get them, you don't have to worry about shredding them. I strongly recommend a cross cut shredder. I personally reassembled strip shreds before because I shredded my password. Oops. And I realized how easy it was the next day I went out and bought a confetti shredder. There's some other things too about where are you taking your trash? What are you putting in your recycling bin? We all want to be environmentally conscious, but what is really going in that recycling bin and what can it say about you? The other thing too is the other stuff that goes in the trash, maybe you're throwing out a computer, bad for the environment, I know. After you've taken out the hard drive, do you really want to put it out in front of your house? And when you throw away the TV box, this is a favorite thing of thieves, you throw out that big screen TV box in front of your house and what does it say? Hey, I just bought a new big screen TV, come on in and steal it. Think of some other locations for taking your trash. Retail shopping, no discount cards, paying cash. You may have to spend some time up front getting enough cash to buy those new shoes and carrying that cash with you. Also about renting a movie, instead of renting maybe you buy the movie, maybe have your friend rent it, maybe use a fake name. Judge Robert Bork now knows very well not to rent porn movies in his own name. He's not on the Supreme Court because of that. Phones are tough as well because a lot of folks want credit checks and background checks, they want you to fax in a passport, proxy agent works, you don't have to give them a social security number, they don't have to run a credit check, ask what the options are. A bunch of different options here. If you really want to be private, go for a pager, a one-way pager with a voicemail box for your inbound calls. It's not tied to your house, it's not tied to your person. You can return the phone call from pay phones, from cell phones that may not be turned on all the time. If you really want to be private, that's the best way to go right now. Because of that, again, that direct association between the physical address and where you live. There's some other options. Please, for God's sakes, don't use a cordless phone. Even the spread spectrum phones, even the ones that are scrambled, can be easily picked up. Now I can't go down to Radio Shack, go buy my 49 megahertz scanner and listen to everything you say. It's a little bit tougher than that, but it's an over-the-air broadcast. And lastly, again, opt out. The idea here with the CP&I, our customer proprietary network information, is folks like SBC are selling all of your phone call information. You can opt out of that, but they may not come right out front and tell you you can opt out. Opt out, investigate the privacy policy, or just say, the heck with it, I'm going to go wireless. There are issues with wireless, I realize, but it's a little bit better because it doesn't slave you to a physical location all of the time. You can turn off the cell phone. Some other things about cell phones, when you turn on a cell phone, turn off the cell phone, that's logged. That location is logged. There was a guy that was picked up recently because he turned off his cell phone in the vicinity where a girl was kidnapped and raped. He happened to be in the parking lot. Yes, he was a convicted sex offender, but they found him because he turned off his cell phone there. Not necessarily a good idea. So there is additional logging that you have to think about with cell phones. Calling cards are great in that some calling cards don't pass your calling number information. You need to do some testing ahead of time. I just did some testing this week with the MCI cards and found out they don't. I'll let you guys do some experimentation and find out which ones do not pass that information. Also, some of the VoIP providers do not pass the calling number information as well. Inbound mail and whatnot. Don't let anything go to your real address and your real name ever. The mail folks and FedEx and whatever, they're more than happy to deliver to Joe Smith at your address. That's not a problem. When you call up the store, they say, you know, I need your actual address or they need to say, I'm only going to deliver this to the address. Say it's a gift. Send a gift to yourself. Commercial mail receiving agencies are cool, but a lot of them by law are required to take another ID from you. You can get around that though by calling around because occasionally these folks will get a new clerk in there and they won't take an ID. Mailing from the workplace or mailing to the workplace is also a good idea. It's away from the house, but be careful about that inbound mail. Proxy we've covered. Having somebody else set up the PO box or your mailboxes, et cetera, also works for you. Do you need a functional mailbox at your residence? If you have a functional mailbox at your residence, you're going to get mail there. Maybe you just take it down. Why do you need a mailbox if you're never getting mail at your house? It certainly might tip somebody off that you have a PO box, but it may also lower your profile. If you take stuff to the post office, you may get recorded. You can take stuff to FedEx and pay cash. They won't tell you this. But here's a little tip. If you go to FedEx and pay cash on a $32 charge and it's $32 charge and you only have 40 and they don't have change, don't tell them to keep an $8 tip. Chances are your package will not be going through. Opt out, use aliases. Change the spelling of your name. Don't use your name. Magazine subscriptions. There's lots of databases with lots of information to magazine subscriptions. Newstand is certainly the best option or have it go to a different mailbox and a different name. Computer-based, I'm sure we all know all sorts of good things about computers, so I'm not going to spend any time on this slide. Education. Most of us don't have kids, but some of us are thinking about having kids if you really want to maintain your privacy, the only option that you have is homeschooling. If you end up going to public school, you're hosed. And it's a real bummer because there's some decent public schools out there, but think of it this way. They're going to want to know your home phone number, all the different ways to contact you. When Johnny goes to school, do you think he's not going to tell them his home phone number? Teacher is going to say, yeah, home phone number is a good thing. It's really hard to get a six-year-old not to say where he lives or what his phone number is. When you go to college, you don't really have an option to homeschool college. I suppose you could do, like, remote study programs. There's some options for you on college, but you also have to think with college, your information goes away. You go away, but your information stays. And recently, there's been a real spate of break-ins at colleges where they've stolen alumni information, current information. They've stolen information about everybody that's applied to the school, name, address, date of birth, social security number, the whole enchilada. Those are things that you've got to think about. Who is watching you with surveillance? This is not really a surveillance talk, but you have those things that you want to think about, too. If you're private and you're worried that somebody's following you home, is somebody listening to what you're saying, somebody watching you, the good news about the Wired article, although there might be 9,000 cameras in New York, they're not all linked together yet. Now, for the most part, it's unlikely. So there's not a possibility of, say, 9,000 cameras tracking you today, but in Vegas there is. In Manhattan, there's not, more the real world, there's not. The facial recognition is something that we've read about as far as I can tell, it's not working all that well right now outside of Vegas. And it kind of comes back to, you know, they've got to have that information. Did they buy the original picture that's tied your picture to your name? Did they buy that picture? Maybe you wear a hat. I'm not sure what the options are on that, but right now it's a threat. Maybe you just avoid those places. The Vana commissions with Tempest, you know, if you monitor leaking, we all thought liquid crystal displays were the answer. Now we come to find out that liquid crystal displays are not the answer, that those too are leaking information. There's some ways around that I suggest that you Google. Maybe we do some things with fonts, instead of going black-white like this is, we change the fonts to font kind and the font color and create such a strong signature for the Vana commissions. So some other things are going to happen to you in life. You're going to go to the doctor and you have to worry about the administrative staff. You have to worry about the outsourcing that takes place. The information going to the doctor, the administrative office, the administrative back office, the insurance agent, several people on down ended up in India. And I don't mean that in a negative way, but it certainly will travel around and you don't know where your information is gone. When you sign on the dotted line now with HIPAA, that says, hey, have my information, have a nice day. Drug companies are taking your information, researchers, a lot of folks are taking your information and doing all sorts of creative things with it. And if you're concerned about it, there's some things you can do about it. Go to a free clinic, go to a people's clinic. You may not be going to the doctor that's published in the recent New England Journal of Medicine, but hey, if it's a sore throat or something simple or maybe an embarrassing infection, you know, you can get away with that. Local health fairs are also a good option because they don't require an ID. Actually, a lot of doctor's offices don't require an ID, but sometimes they do require a medical card, which is an effective ID. Sometimes you can get away with, look, here's a couple hundred dollars cash while you just treat me. If it's a gunshot wound, now that's not going to work. Paying cash with prescriptions, again, it's a good idea, but you think about here, you go into a pharmacy, chances are you're giving them your real name, you may not be able to, you know, depending on what name you gave the doctor, you wrote it to John Smith, you go get John Smith a prescription, you can pay cash, but if you paid with your credit card, now all of a sudden that, you know, your credit card company's got medical information cross-pollinating on that. Non-chain doctors work a little bit better because chances are they're not going to outsource all that information. They are hiring folks in-house. It's a smaller profile here. The last part of that NAPS, not NAPSTER, but NASPR, NASPR is a policy now that several states have joined on and what they're doing is they are recording prescription drugs and different class medications. So these are narcotics and whatnot and they're tracking it because they're looking for people, they're abusing the system. They're basically building profiles of you. Proxy agents may not work here, buying your drugs on the black market, I don't know. Going to Canada or option. Going to Mexico, take your chances. Lastly, we've got some big life events that happen and births, deaths generally end up in the newspaper. You're trying to maintain a low profile remember, so how can you keep that information out of the newspaper? It becomes very embarrassing from you and you find out that you've done a dang good job but your brother has created this obituary for your grandmother that reports where everybody in the family lives. And all that information is out there. Usually too much information. Go pick up a paper read the obituaries and you're going to usually see too much information. Obviously hospitals are a big source of records. Anybody that's had a kid knows that you start getting those Pampers ads like what after three months or four months gets ridiculous. Your information is getting sold out. Law enforcement, avoid. Some other things about law enforcement you know they're emailing lawyers in jail that you may need representation. Police are using mobile cameras now. Which in some ways is a really good idea. There's a video record but the fact that they're keeping it around for 90 days. Again it's background information for you. You've got a cop behind you or a cop in front of you they might be recording you. Today this may not be a problem but now all of a sudden if they do automatic license plate identification and say you know record that in some database there's potential to be a problem. So here's some just random fun facts and figures. Let me tell you about my flat in Britain and this is a little bit scary for me the fact that the television licensing authority can at any moment break into my flat and look for a television set. If I haven't paid the television licensing fee. You have different laws in different countries and you have different threats in different countries and you have to do the research at each place or maybe you have to go to a rabbit ears in the window don't stick a big area up if you haven't paid the fee. Again that's maybe where that sharing comes in. The third bullet point on here is rather amusing because as the second bullet point where Mom and son go to I think it was Best Buy to buy a flight simulator program and the 17 year old clerk says that's illegal you're not allowed And I'm not sure what to do about that. These are things to keep in mind. If you're confronted with that 17-year-old clerk, maybe go talk to the store manager. We've got a problem here. You've got that on your store shelf. Would I need to be 21 to buy a flight simulator software? Things to think about. The last bullet point on here is Linda Tripp. You may remember her from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Now if you're a government employee, some of you may be, you have a background check. And that background check is a large folder with lots of embarrassing information on you. You have to ask yourself, is it worth it? Now you're taking all of your information, mostly your embarrassing stuff, all your financial records, you're putting it in one spot. Now the people that have access to that are generally trusted individuals, but you can ask yourself, do you really want all that information in one spot? A shopping center in Denver, Colorado, Cherry Creek Shopping Center. They're literally going around and recording license plate numbers looking to build a profile of their clientele. Now the good news is, at least they claim, they're not building an individual. It's an aggregate data collection. It's very easy for them, though, they already have the data as an individual. What's to stop them from now targeting you as an individual? There are some bright sides out there. I don't want to leave everybody with doom and gloom. There are some people that are successfully being private. There was a couple of folks from college that decided to run away and go to Florida, and they weren't found for about five days because they turned off their cell phone and didn't use credit cards. They were eventually found sort of randomly because their car was spotted in a parking lot, but it can be done. And I want to encourage each of you guys to maybe do some steps to start to go down this road. Some resources for you, again, this is on the CD. You don't need to take pictures or come up and say, hey, hold the slide. How to be invisible book, I can't recommend enough. This guy is an ex-Franco worker out of Spain, and he's made it his mission in life to be private. And a lot of the tips that came from the speech came out of here. This guy lives privacy, and it's a really good idea. It may consider him a nut, but at the same time, he's got some good suggestions out there. More on Opting Out, Living Without Social Security Number, Lucky 225, can be done. And again, there's a lot of resources out there. End stocking in America. A lot of the privacy stuff is geared towards people who are being stocked. And if you act like someone that's being stocked, you too can sort of have that mentality and not worry, or at least, you know, you've got sort of a support club out there and they've got a lot of ideas about how you cannot be tracked. Some deeper reading, there's been some good papers written about privacy and hiding. The Homeland Security paper that Torch Concepts did had all sorts of great employee, or not employee, it was passenger data in the original report. They had their name, their date of births, you know, all that fun stuff. It's since been blacked out. But it gives you an idea about the level of depth that people are actually going to to find information. I've just started the 9-11 report, and as I go through the fine print in the back, there's a lot of great details about how Air Security works and how they're actually building up the CAP system doing the employee, or not the employee, but the passenger profiling. Real quick thoughts on the future. Certainly the RFID chips are a big problem. They're not really, I think, a problem yet for most of us, but they're certainly coming. There's a bunch of other things that are coming that are either in Congress right now or being talked about. Genetic testing is certainly a huge threat to genetic profiling. And the data really becoming omnipresent, which is these databases are getting linked together, and that big profile that the marketers are just drooling over with that 360-degree profile of, you know, this guy needs Tylenol two times a year buys this kind of toilet paper and really likes eating in and out burger and starts sending you the targeted marketing. That's where they're trying to go, where they're trying to take it, but they're not quite there yet, fortunately. And the good news is our friends up to the north in Canada, at least the Privacy Commissioner's got a clue and had a clue before he got thrown out, as I understand. And they have an idea that privacy is good business, and I encourage all of you to take back and talk to the folks that you work with and make privacy good business. If you don't collect the data, you don't have to worry about protecting it. Ask yourself why you need to collect the data. With that, I'll take any questions that you have. We've got about three minutes left. We've got five minutes left. Okay. Question over here. So the file income taxes, that's a good question. I'm sorry. The question was, what's the best way to file income taxes? And in my book, the best way to file income taxes is honestly, because you end up with the law enforcement problem. In terms of filing income taxes, not from my residence for seven years now, and I have no problem with the federal government having that information, because if they come after me, then I've got a bigger problem. That certainly is one of the trade-offs you could say about living in the U.S. that you're going to file, for me at least, you're going to file the income taxes, and I'm not going to deal with the flip side of the law enforcement problem. But the income taxes are a problem. Certainly the IRS has been a big source of information, and that's why if you don't have income, you do the bar system, you can reduce some things down like that. Or you don't claim the same deductions, because with an income tax form, you itemize all your deductions out for kids and whatnot, or trips to DEF CON. You may think about, well, if you don't list that out, then it's not going to be in somebody's big round file. Another question here. The question was, can you recommend a good source for federal and state laws on privacy? I don't have one particular site. I'm not sure if I've got a good resource out there on privacy. The problem that you run into, that I found on the law side, is there are so many different areas of privacy that there is not, you may have one law conflicting with another law, if I'm in the medical business, and yet I'm issuing credit, because somebody comes in and has a medical procedure done, now I may have two laws that conflict with each other. The best thing I can recommend is start with the big ones, like HIPAA, and kind of work your way down from there. If you're a business and you're looking for legal information, that's a lot tougher, and it's pretty much consult with a lawyer. It's kind of a standard, unfortunate answer. Question in the back. So the question was, what about post-office boxes? What about private post-office boxes? There's actually what I call as a post-office boxes, or non-resident post-office boxes. There's your regular PO box at a post office, then there is a commercial mail receiving agency, like post-office boxes, etc. Then you actually can have like your lawyer, or you have a random street address that can get mail for you. As an example, wait about somebody that just stuck up a mailbox on the street, painted a number on it, and started getting mail there. If you've ever driven in the country, sometimes there's a whole rack of boxes out there, there might be 30 mailboxes, where you put 11.5, and you nail it down and you start sending stuff there. This person was successful at getting mail there. If you go to the commercial mail receiving agencies, there's additional ID requirements, and your best bet on that is to call around and find one that has either minimum ID requirement, or use a proxy agent, best friend that doesn't care about it, have him set it up or have her set it up for you. All right, thank you.