Ok, so this one is a doozy

And why this clown is very sad to feel the need for it.

You need to learn tradecraft.

It sucks, but it is a reality of surviving and being effective as a dissident in a fascist regime.

Even if you choose not to practice and hone your skills (tradecraft mandates practice and continuous learning), you should still at least learn some basics.

There is a very long reading list for learning the basics. We at C.A.R. are here to try to simplify your transition into that very long reading list. Pick any John le Carré (pseudonym for IRL British spy David John Moore Cornwell) book (not movies) and read it. Yes, they are novels - but they are accurate in their depictions of general tradecraft. Don’t go watch a Bond or Mission Impossible movie: they will absolutely steer you wrong!

In the non-fiction category, there are many former spies who have written books with varying degrees of information about tradecraft. One that stands out to me as being very good at getting into the nitty-gritty details is from a former Mossad agent, By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky. If you can find it and read it - ignoring his politics, focusing instead on the tradecraft - it will help you a lot!

My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals With the U.S., by Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr - again, ignoring his politics, focusing instead on the tradecraft - it will also help from a different perspective.

Photo by Steve Harrris on Unsplash

Tradecraft requires you to be open-minded and not rigid. You have to be able to understand what your enemies are thinking and likely to do before they start thinking or acting. You have to put yourself in their shoes and frame of reference - in the context of the fact that you cannot know or think everything they do. You have to be able to **empathize** with adversaries. You don’t have to approve of their actions, but you have to understand why they are taking those actions. If you can understand why they are taking those actions better than they understand why: you have a leg up on them.

Tradecraft is all about leverage. Think that stupid TV show, only don’t use it to guide your learning about tradecraft. Just their use of the word. Borrowing from the format I use for Letters from Rural America, here’s the definition:

leverage (n): the strategic use of influence, relationships, or resources to achieve a desired outcome

— Some plagiarizing LLM.

Desired outcome: safely make riot police laugh and survive to clown again without being arrested or holding the attention of fascist secret police forces.

Leverage: clown suit and clowning skills - make the riot police laugh

Leverage: learning crowd dynamics from the riot police perspective - safety and survival.

Leverage: large crowd ingress/egress tradecraft - avoiding surveillance

Leverage: support team knowledgeable about tradecraft in large crowd/riot & secret police situations - all of the above.

Leverage: full weight and support of the fascist state - including riot & secret police trained in varying degrees and scopes of tradecraft - what you have to overcome.

Photo by Zac Meadowcroft on Unsplash

Surveillance is a weighty topic.

Don’t expect yourself to learn everything, everywhere, all at once. Dissidents in fascist regimes need to learn how to detect surveillance. The books above will help you a lot in this endeavor, but they are outdated in the technology aspect. That said, you need to understand those old-school, low-tech tradecraft techniques before you can begin to effectively mitigate the tech-surveillance state. In part, because the most effective way to mitigate the high-tech surveillance state is low or no-tech. Also, in part because the low-tech tactics and strategies inform techniques in the high-tech realm.

There are two approaches to dealing with fascist mass surveillance. They both have their uses and pitfalls.

1. “Come and take me: you know who I am, what I’m doing, who I’m doing it with. I trust that I am in the right and am willing to face whatever consequences you impose on me for whatever I do.”

2. Operate from shadows.

Great spies know how to do both, depending on what leverage they need to apply. There are famously numerous celebrities who operated as covert, from-the-shadows spies. Yes, red-carpet celebrities who went behind enemy lines to achieve a mission.

I suspect most readers of this are like me and prefer approach #1. But you need to understand that there is tradecraft necessary in this approach. It does no more good than me trying to blow up an animal-tying balloon if you are effectively silenced in some lockup or after being poisoned. There is tradecraft in getting your message out even after you are indisposed.

Operating from shadows requires much more technical knowledge of tradecraft.

If you (public or covert) are a priority target for the state, you will likely be surveilled by teams. Well-funded organizations (both state and non-state) always perform surveillance in teams. While there are times where the Hollywood trope of a single car following you does happen, they are rare and typical of underfunded or over-tasked organizations. Over-tasking well-funded agencies is one advantage of having many people using approach number #1 is an uncoordinated and decentralized manner.

Why is it important to understand that state operatives work in teams? There are several reasons, but in surveillance detection - it’s important that you understand this so you don’t start thinking that picking up a tail is anything like what you typically see on streaming services. An operative’s biggest threat is thinking wrongly about something.

There are many easily-found on the Internet rudimentary primers on detecting a surveillance team. Some are better than others. Read all you can find, and synthesize them as best you can. None are perfect. All will teach something useful. I will say that any which don’t start by helping you understand how surveillance teams operate are probably less informative than you need.

How to run a surveillance team

This is a fun activity with a group of 4 to 10 friends that will help you begin to understand.

Pick a clown in your group to be the “target”. Tell them to be in a very general area at a certain time. Don’t be specific. Make it a wide area - easy to hide - with lots of people around. Make the time a range, not an appointment.

Then, with the rest of your friends - get a shared comms channel (conference call on cells works - this is just a game). You are the leader of this “surveillance” team. Your “target” friend’s goal is to find you before you find them.

Your goal is to find them before they find you. You have the team, although it is not enough for a member of your team to find your “target” friend: you - as team lead - have to lay eyes on them before they lay eyes on you. They are alone. Who will win? Most of the time: you. Unless your “target” friend has knowledge and experience with surveillance detection and evasion - then they stand half a chance.

Take turns with your friends with each getting to be both the “target” and the “team lead,” - meaning everyone practices every role on the team.

Variation. The goal of the “target” is to get from a known and observed location and time to a predetermined (but unknown* to the surveillance team) location without the surveillance team following the target all the way to their secret location. The “target” calls the surveillance team and reveals the location to win. The team lead opens the sealed envelope at the location in front of the “target” to win.

* Write the secret location down in a sealed envelope before starting game play

Don’t have a large enough group of friends to play this game with? Ok, here’s a solo game. Go to a big concert. Try to find the leader of the narco team working the parking lot. If the concert is for a band known to attract illegal drug users, that is best because there will be multiple narcotics police teams working the crowd. If you can find and follow the team lead alone without them knowing: you win. If they start asking why you’re looking at them or actively observing you: you lose, try again. This is a game I have played many times. Early on, I would get spotted frequently and have to clown my exfil. It is important to NOT interfere with police activity. Don’t yell “6-Up” or “5-Oh”. It is not your job as a clown to protect drug dealers at concerts. Only observe - trying not to be observed in the process.

Learning tradecraft is like anything else: it takes practice and learning from mistakes.

Embrace The Lessons of Your Failures

Photo by Carlynn Alarid on Unsplash

Embracing the lessons of your failures is solid advice for any endeavor. It is a matter of life-and-death in tradecraft.

True of spies and clown army operatives alike:

“Humility isn’t weakness in this process, it’s a force multiplier.”

— Alias, author of “Embrace the Lessons of Your Failures”, linked above.

Practice success. This doesn’t mean you won’t fail in practice. It means that you learn in practice what worked and what didn’t. And then you practice with what worked, building off it and developing strategies to avoid what didn’t. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Get good at running a surveillance team and you will be better at detecting surveillance teams. The more environments you practice in, the better you will be. Practice in a busy suburban shopping area. Practice at a large concert. Practice in an urban core. Practice in a rural area. Get good at finding your “target” friend before they find you. Running surveillance and detecting/avoiding it are two sides of the same coin. If driving - having a passenger with a map helps a lot. Or someone on comms with a map works as well. You can’t be driving and trying to follow someone who is trying not to be followed if you are looking at maps. As team lead - you’re two blocks or a mile away. You might be sitting at home running the map. But all the same, don’t drive distracted. Especially not if you are practicing driving with soft eyes.

Some generalized tips for detecting and evading surveillance

Patterns are the clay that successful surveillance teams mold into operational intelligence.

Want to learn how to detect and evade surveillance? Start with paying attention to your patterns. What time do you leave for work? What time do you get home? What do you do in between? When you go to the protest, do you always take the same route? Do you always go with the same people? What do you do after the protest? Who do you talk to regularly? When? Why? How? What’s your favorite quick meal on the go? What’s your favorite Sunday drive or hike? What do you do when you’re out in public and have a sudden and unexpected bowel movement threatening to clown your drawers? What do you do when you go through a romantic breakup? What do you do when you see a car accident? What do you do when you get injured?

Surveillance teams document these patterns. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, a surveillance team assigned to you does - so you had better figure it out.

Why?

Because detecting and evading surveillance teams starts with breaking those patterns. Mixing them up. Changing them constantly. Does it normally take you an hour on the bus and subway to get to work? Start planning on two hours. Check out that subway line you’ve never ridden on your way to work one day. Walk to work another. Take a cab (cash) and get to work early, another. Surprise yourself. If you think you’ll bike to work tomorrow, hop in your car when you pick up the bike helmet.

Going to meet up with your protest buddies after work? Treat it like a flash mob with a pre-arranged secret word in a social media post to indicate which library you’ll meet at. Vary those locations often. Go someplace none of you have ever been before. Change how you communicate that location code word. Sometimes social media, sometimes a voice call. Maybe just put up a Clown Army of Resistance poster on the bike rack outside the library you met at two times ago - with the code word in the clown recruitment message?

Clowning as resistance is all about breaking regime narratives. Surveillance evasion and detection is all about breaking patterns. It is also about constant situational awareness.

Surviving war, and living in a fascist state is war, means constant situational awareness. From the time you wake up until you feel safe to sleep: what are you seeing, smelling, hearing? What’s different than last time? Who is paying attention to me on the subway? Have I seen them before? Do they seem to be paying inordinate attention to me? Maybe they are, if it feels off - change your pattern quickly. Change cars. Get off at the next stop and go find a bus.

When you get on a train or bus: sit where you can see everyone else - near the back but not necessarily all the way back. Hunters talk a lot about “soft eyes”. You want to see/feel everyone on the bus with you, without looking too hard for too long at anyone. At a concert? Bleacher seats rule (unless you’re trying to actually listen to the bassist’s interactions with the drummer, in which case you can usually find sweet spots in the concourses where it is easier to have soft eyes around you than riding the rail). When you go to a bar or restaurant - sit near the back or the front. If those aren’t available, your back against an outside wall works. Again, soft eyes.

Sitting in a parking lot as part of your habit of changing patterns? Park where you can see as much around you as possible. Notice the van in the parking lot across the street with its lights on or exhaust coming out of the tailpipe when it seems to be lingering like you are. Notice if it leaves. Does another car show up shortly after? What do the occupants of that car do? Do they get out and go into the state-sanctioned usury loan store and stay about as long as every other sucker who goes in and out? Or do the occupants stay in the car? Soft eyes. Does anyone drive close enough to you to take a picture? Are they?

If you have to watch video fiction to learn about surveillance techniques like “lead and follow”, you can’t do much better than The Wire.

Soft Eyes - The Wire

Refugees - The Wire

Lessons - The Wire

At protests

ingress (v): the act of entering or the means of access to a place.

egress (v): refers to the act of exiting or the means of departure from a place

Protests in public spaces have multiple points of ingress and egress. Routes in and routes out. At large crowd-controlled public gatherings, it is common for points of ingress and points of egress to be different. Think of a concert or sporting event - you typically aren’t going through any turnstiles or security screening lines when you leave. Ingress is typically more tightly controlled than egress. While you may have only one or two entrances for your ticketed seating area, you can probably leave through any exit.

At a protest with a heavy law enforcement presence, the riot line may not be where it was on your way in when you leave. They move them. They add new ones. Your clear ingress may be a restricted egress.

If you are attending alone - arrive EARLY! If you are with a group - don’t arrive together and have the diligent and observant friend be the one to arrive early. You or your friend should position yourselves to be able to observe the flow of other protesters as they come and go. Find the visible police presence (they arrive early too). Understand that the visible police presence may very well be in communication with surveillance teams. Arriving early is a great way to observe and identify team leaders. Look for rooftop observation points. Yes, there may be snipers. Understand that these rooftop observation points have optics that can count your nose hairs. So do drones/helicopters.

Watch the crowd grow like you are LEO - watch the groups of protesters. Which ones seem most likely to get argumentative with police? Which ones seem most likely to be itching for a kinetic fight? Clown those folks. Remind them that if they can make riot police laugh that riot police are much less likely to commit acts of violence. Which ones did you notice talking with folks hanging out near the LEO command center before the crowds started to gather? Clown them keystone-cop style when they join the crowd - your job is to protect protesters - remember practicing observing narco teams at concerts? Watch if they retreat back to the command center. Watch how the command center reacts. Do they start observing you? Time to egress.

Teams are better at this than individuals. Assign roles. One person is doing the observing. Others are working on crowd de-escalation. If someone is comfortable with front-line riot police de-escalation, they should be doing that. Every member of the team should have soft eyes on every other member of the team frequently. Is anyone watching your observing friend too closely? Have a subtle signal to let that friend know so they can egress. It is good to have the “come and take me” type and the stay in the shadows type on the same team. It might be good to rotate roles if team members competencies overlap.

LEAVE EARLY! Every member of your protest group should leave separately and using different egress points. Remember practicing meeting up after work? Do that. Remember taking different routes to and from work and planning on spending a lot more time doing it than the direct route would require? Do that.

The longer the protest goes, the more risk of violence and roundups grows. This is why you leave early. Those who want to actively resist police violence and roundups are not clowns. They have a role - think the last man at Gallipoli.

A clown’s role at a protest is to protect civilians. People who stay after scheduled protest times or orders to disperse are not civilians - trust them to know how to take care of themselves or learn from their failures. They are covering civilian egress without picking fights - if they are doing their jobs properly. They are organized, staged, and incremental retreaters if they know what they are doing. If they aren’t doing their jobs properly - you don’t want to be around them anyway.

When you leave - if you are the public face - the one clowning on the front lines - you are most likely to have picked up the attention of an unassigned surveillance team, but the observer is also pretty likely to have picked up new surveillance - LEO will think of them as the ringleader. It is a good idea for the observer keep their clown on the inside and try to be as unremarkable as possible. As a lone wolf, I sometimes play both roles - observer and “come and get me” clown. This isn’t something I recommend to others. Find your team. Learn and practice and work together. Being a lone-wolf clown operative is high-risk and probably the domain of the foolhardy.

The egress process is the most likely time for that newfound or long-standing surveillance team to turn the actionable intelligence they’ve gathered on you into detention or arrest. Ingress is also a possibility. They might try to affect that detention away from others’ attention. Or they may try to create egress bottlenecks so they can trap you and pull you out of the crowd. Find the path of least resistance in your egress if bottlenecks are the tactic you observe. Blend into the crowd (hard to do in clown costume unless the whole crowd are in clown costumes) if you don’t observe egress bottlenecks. Maintain your situational awareness. Egress bottlenecks can form quickly and unexpectedly. If you are going out over the fence between the park and the drainage ditch into the neighborhood - notice who is watching you. Someone is. How do they react? You might have to switch up quick, go to plan D for egress.

Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash

A brief note about high-tech surveillance.

Machine vision is a game-changer in surveillance. It can recognize you through a mask. Your gait, the way you walk. Your height. Your girth. The width of your shoulders and waist. The way you swing your arms when you walk and when you run. Look for possible blind-spots in camera/drone/rooftop surveillance zones. When you think you are in one - switch up your gait. Hunch. Stand up straight. Fake a limp. Hide your real limp. peel off an outer layer of clothing. Move your backpack to a belly-pack. Ask a friendly in the crowd if you can switch backpacks until the next possible blind spot. A blind spot could be an alcove in the middle of the block or just squatting down inside a group of large men. Ask them to linger while you switch up, replacing your clown nose for an N-95 or putting a hoodie on and hiding the pack holding it under it against your belly. Know that the algorithms are looking strongly at probabilities - go for low-percentage chances of matching you in camera B with you in camera A. Show up in camera Z instead of camera B after you switch things up. You want the matching algorithm to make you a low-likelihood match.

Don’t approach your car or subway station until you are reasonably sure that no one is paying too much attention to you. Don’t use the closest subway station. Don’t use the closest parking garage. Plan to be walking a while after you leave. Duck into a friendly coffee shop (not Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts) and order something. Use the bathroom while you wait for your order. Change your shoes, wash off the clown makeup. Enjoy your coffee - watching with soft eyes as you do. Go out the back way.

It is illegal to obscure your license plate. But license plate readers are very much real. It is illegal to drive with a fictitious license plate. In my neck of the woods, police tend to ignore the sovereign citizen types who don’t license/insure their vehicles. That is definitely not true in more urban areas. Hitching a ride from other protesters isn’t a bad idea for getting out of a protest zone and to the grocery store you parked at miles away. Or just enjoy the nice long stroll in the cool night air.

Maybe you and your friends meet back up the next day after church. Or at church. Or for brunch. Maybe you reconnect on a secure messaging app when you get home. Maybe you wait until your next after-work meetup. Maybe you go find a new group of friends to go protest with.

REGARDLESS

BEFORE YOU GO TO A PROTEST, LAWYER UP. MEMORIZE THE LAWYER’S NUMBER. SHARE IT WITH SOMEONE NOT AT THE PROTEST. TELL THAT SOMEONE WHEN YOU EXPECT TO BE HOME AND WHEN THEY SHOULD CALL THE LAWYER. If you cannot afford an attorney, ask protest organizers who they use - you’ll probably find that lawyer has very reasonable retainer rates and might go pro-bono if you are unlawfully detained or arrested.

SPECIAL NOTE GIVEN CURRENT Fascist Terror Threat Level

In nascent fascist regimes, it is not uncommon for non-state actors to also present a surveillance and/or kinetic threat. They know everything I just wrote and more. They may look like friendlies, just like police undercover agents do.

They may look like police, in part because they are tacitly supported by the regime with an “it’s only illegal if you get exposed” attitude. They will not be disciplined like the police. You will learn to spot them if you look for that.

With multiple actors in a crowded space, there are unique challenges. Den of thieves and spies, as it were. In metroplexes like LA or DC or New York - there may be professional foreign agents with significant presence.

This is not a space for amateurs. But here we are, whether we like it or not. Amateurs get people killed and imprisoned. Did you read the part about practicing in your daily life? Have you groked yet that the assignment from the C.A.R. intel training department here is not to go to a protest and play spy - save that for fun time with your friends. The assignment is to start reading and learning.

"I wondered whether you were tired. Burnt out." There was a long silence.
"That's up to you," Leamas said at last.
"We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean. . . one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold. . . d'you see what I mean?"

— John le Carré - The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

Clowns are not spies. But in clown-wars against fascists, we must learn from the spies. Why? Because a bunch of clowns in prison isn’t as much fun as I make it sound.

Practice approach #1 to surveillance at protests first. But do tell your friends you’ll meet them at the protest and meet up after. Take different routes.

And do start practicing and playing surveillance games in your daily life. Practice varying your routine. Practice observing your habits. Practice what you learn when you read.

The article linked above - no, not the wikipedia articles about The Wire episodes I think are most relevant to what I’m trying to teach you here. The one about hugging your inner clown. Did you catch how I flipped the link headline just a little? Practice that. That article, about embracing failure, it comes from a publication which seems so far to be better than most on the subject. Skip the “Acclimation Method of Breaching a Perimeter” article for now. We don’t need clowns performing infiltration ops anytime soon. That’s the kind of stuff that will get you killed as an amateur.

“Psyche Exfiltration: Escaping Mental Traps You’ve Built Yourself Into” looks like my next read.

“Non-Linear Evasion: The Art of the Unexpected Exit” is a good read if you think you are currently a priority target of the fascist state and/or want to know about egress tactics at large protests (YOU DO).

Principle Three: Think Like the Predator

You want to disappear? Then stop thinking like prey. Prey runs in panic, operatives calculate like predators. To beat surveillance or tracking, you need to understand how they hunt. Learn how they track.

• Visual surveillance? They track movement, direction, and pace.

• Thermal drones? They scan patterns of escape along probable lines.

• Human trackers? They look for broken brush, boot prints, and logical exits.

So don’t leave logic on the trail. Leave chaos.

— Alias, “Non-Linear Evasion: The Art of the Unexpected Exit”

You’ll notice I started this training with the suggestion to play surveillance games in safe contexts - where you doing the surveilling. This is third principle is why.

I will be restacking it with a note, but you can find it here:

“This Clown Hates the Author’s Handle for Reasons I’m Pretty Sure the Author Understood When They Picked It”

Don’t use one source. Use every source you can get your hands on.

The library is your best friend right now. Libraries LOVE Clowns.

You need to start learning tradecraft, and I’m not talking about blowing up animal-tying balloons. I mean, I need to learn how to blow up a long, narrow balloon before I can teach you how, right?

I am very good at spotting narco teams at Grateful Dead concerts. Why? Because I read. I learned. I practiced. If you see me at a JRAD show and you aren’t dealing illegal drugs or pushing industrial NO2 into idiots lungs: ask me to point out the team lead. Of course, it is very unlikely you’ll see me at a JRAD show anytime soon. If you lead, you must follow. Follow the breadcrumbs of learning. Follow the wisdom of seasoned pros. Follow your moral and ethical compass. Follow your gut. Follow that voice in your head that tells you sometimes it’s someone at your window and sometimes you just need a gardener. Listen to the woman who tells you the tree needs to be trimmed, and then trim it. You’ll understand what I mean here better after reading more Le Carre. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. Just because they might be out to get you doesn’t mean your paranoia is based in reality. A spy is constantly questioning themselves on what they think they know. A clown army operative needs to be the same.

Photo by Bhautik Patel on Unsplash