R: 8 / I:
I mentioned in an earlier post that I have seen four people on Free Republic make reference to being “gangstalked,” and they were attributing it to their conservative activism. I had never heard of the term, but on looking it up, saw a lot of people describing being exposed to classic decoy/diversion surveillance operations. Interestingly there is a copy online of a filing by Glenn Beck seeking approval to construct a wall around his house in Connecticut back when he lived there, due to cars constantly driving by and photographing the house. And then there is the curious case of radio host Tom Bauerle, where the police report of the incident is not publicly available due to “sensitivities.”
I was reading an old surveillance manual a while back, “Secrets Of Surveillance: A Professional’s Guide To Tailing Subjects By Vehicle, Foot, Airplane, And Public Transportation,” written by a private security contractor. The book is outdated in several spots, most notably in the photography area, but otherwise it is a good window into team surveillance procedures and techniques, as they existed just a few years back. It notes that in law enforcement, most mobile operations run by local law enforcement will entail three to six operators, while federal will often assign coverage in twelve man teams.
In high-priority federal operations, the twelve man teams may be assigned a sector, where they will loiter while waiting to handle the phase of the target’s travels that occur in that sector. Alternately, a single team can simulate such phased coverage by parking a fleet of surveillance cars in parking lots in each sector, and then having a large portion of the team break away from surveillance on entering the new sector, head to the lot, leave their car and pick up another, and then rejoin the surveillance in a different car.
One noticeable characteristic this might produce is a group of cars parked in a large lot far away from any stores. As an example, if you go to Home Depot, and everyone parks as close to the front door as possible, but way off, at the very end of the lot are a bunch of empty cars just sitting there isolated, that could be a group of surveillance vehicles, waiting for a team to switch into them, to alter what they call their silhouette as they track a target through different sectors. The surveillance aware individual will notice such indices, though draw no concrete conclusion from them.
This method of simulating phased coverage, combined with the immense disguise-training, posture and gait alteration training, and custom fitted “costume kit” carried by each surveillant can allow a single team to effectively simulate a much larger operation, and avoid having the target see the same person or car following them around.
Still, all of that is very complicated to execute, and can be made more so when you have a single team moving to an unfamiliar area on short notice, trying to fit in on the fly and tail subjects they have little knowledge of, through streets they’ve never seen before. When you look at the unrestricted budgets in this age of terrorism, and combine it with all the people saying they are blanketed under in-person surveillance, I am beginning to suspect some wunderkind of the surveillance world may have created a large number of high-end surveillance teams, all inserted permanently into as many neighborhoods around major cities as they could cajole government into financing. Clearly after September 11th we were bracing for a covert war waged within American borders against hidden Muslim sleeper cells. A massive increase in embedded surveillance assets would have fit right in with that.
Thrasymachus writes in a comment:
A political deviant I used to read complained about “gang stalking” by which he meant observation meant to intimidate. He also related the story of another, who lived in the DC suburbs and had a lot of private security company cars come into his neighborhood and drive by his house.
Even if they have a lot of money, which I don’t doubt, how many people can they afford to watch like this?
First, for any who stumble on this, if this is occurring, this isn’t a special “gangstalking” unit that just follows people around to harass them – it is simply government surveillance, specifically decoy/diversion surveillance designed to keep you focused on it through its harassing nature. The only difference between these operators and other LE surveillance is that because they are assigned to overt decoy duty, these operators have probably burned a covert op in the past through incompetence, and thus they are no longer trusted with the ultra-elite jobs where the team absolutely must not be noticed.
In-person decoy/diversion surveillance is usually the final piece of the surveillance puzzle, because it is the most expensive. Covert surveillance, technical monitoring, even a single undercover infiltrating your social circle, are all vastly less expensive than a multi-operator decoy team. For this reason, if you see pedestrians or cars when you are out, or by your house, then you have both pedestrians and cars, as well as technical monitoring on your house, at least one observation post on your house, an infiltration/stealth-layer, they are pulling the photos of your mail that the Postal Service takes of all mail, they have grabbed your garbage in the past – and probably still are, and they are monitoring your banking, phone, internet, and anything else which just involves pulling some data. That is just how it works. They never mobilize the massive cash to assign a team to follow you and leave all that other cheaply and easily acquired material to waste.
Now back to the question, if this is real – “How can they afford this?” That is why this interests me, despite it being so unlikely and strange a topic. Very few people who report this are of any importance, practically. I doubt anyone who reports it could justify a fraction of the expense of surveilling them. I have no doubt that if there were a secret cabal, and a cabal leader, he could care less what grassroots conservative activists are doing. None of us can have a practical effect on the leviathan of government – the machine is too big and corrupted. Now if you assume this is going on (and from the volume of accounts it would appear at least likely somebody is seeing something), that would still leave a few possibilities.
One, surveillance is now everywhere in certain areas, as a sort of permanent federal force of plainclothes cops, and because Conservatives have functional amygdalae and are threat conscious, they are noticing it while others are not. This would be nice, because it means there is no targeting, and it would explain how they afford it – it doesn’t cost them anything because it is already deployed as a part of the new surveillance state. Maybe, but if you take the reports seriously, it seems unlikely based on the descriptions, which seems to indicate some targeting.
Another possibility would be that the surveillance machine is getting big, and somebody at the top is using the excess assets, or the training operations, to “accidently” target people, out of personal disdain for their political activity. I would lean toward this, given the IRS scandal, and that Sharyl Atkisson was definitely targeted if she found classified documents planted on her computer.
It would not be surprising to find a lawless, rule-breaking area of law enforcement like intelligence would attract the SJW mindset. Once there, all they would have to do is assign training ops to target known conservatives to practice their craft. Then they practice can their decoy/diversion surveillance techniques on targets who pose no threat, and harass conservatives at the same time. It wouldn’t offer any cost, since they have to spend the resources they are spending to train anyway. For someone like Lois Lerner, it would be a no-brainer.
That would be bad.
But the bigger issue I wonder about is, if this is real, why would they be building up the surveillance infrastructure to the point they have such an excess capacity in the first place? Building a surveillance state like that would be a hell of a career risk. If the media found out that around a major city with 2 million people were surveillance assets, loitering in densities approaching Stasi levels (as was proposed with the TIPS program, and appears to have been, in part continued with the Terrorism Liaison Officer program), that could be a career killer for whoever created it. Somebody would be taking a professional risk to make something that big, which would imply they see a bigger risk in not having it prepared and ready.
I would have to believe it would be related to the massive amounts of debt, and the shaky nature of the financial system. I remember back in 2008, a financial expert using a little known fact about McDonalds to make a point. McDonalds can’t afford to buy what they need to make burgers each day. They literally don’t have the money themselves to buy chop-meat, and couldn’t find the money if they needed it. It is not in their bank account, and they have nothing they can liquidate to get it.
All of their beef, buns, etc is all bought with a system of rotating loans from their banks. They turn each loan into burgers, which then turns into income. They then take the income, return the bank its loaned money plus interest, take the rest as profit, and take out another loan to repeat the process. I assume this is because as they make profit, they try to put it into expansion, to crowd out competitors and maximize size of the franchise, rather than keep it on hand to buy supplies.
The expert said if the banks went down, McDonalds would have shut its doors overnight, as would just about every other big business, from GM, to food giant Cargill, since almost all do all their buying on bank credit. No banks = no credit = no business = no profits = no employees. Overnight. They don’t have any way to pay their own operating expenses without that massive bank loan.
Imagine the cataclysm if the fractional banking system went down. Apple can’t make 100k iPhones at a pop. Pepsi, Nestle, Dell, GM, Unilever, Johnson and Johnson, all the franchises, all those companies transitioning from producing millions of units per year on credit, to producing a few thousand, or a few hundred, just like any small business – getting their money together, ordering a small lot of the items, and paying with their own cash before delivery – if cash still was even still usable as currency.
The retail stores which previously sold several hundred thousand bank-financed iPhones to make salaries for their employees suddenly have only a couple of iPhones to sell per store, and can’t pay their employees, so they lay them off. Delivery companies have almost no iPhones to deliver, so they lay off their employees. Fuel isn’t used to make deliveries or get employees to work, so energy companies downsize. Stock prices of companies like Apple, Fed-Ex, and Bestbuy plummet, wiping out life savings overnight. And the banks where people kept the rest of their savings – the mess began when they went under, taking that value with them, so they are already gone. With all of that goes the tax base, and now government workers are being laid off en masse. Picture that in every business sector, all of it happening within a week or two. Remaining workers having to take massive salary cuts, because of the sudden glut in job seekers willing to do their job for half, or even a tenth of the old salary. No jobs, no money, no products no capital – you see where it goes. The expert explaining this was showing how the banks going down in 2008 would have been cataclysmic to the economy, and it would have happened fast.
I think it entirely possible that government could be building something Sovietesque, because if what appears to be coming materializes, those in power will be in real danger of losing all of their power, and maybe even more in the unrest and chaos that follows.
If they were to build such a machine, you would probably begin to hear from people here and there, who were seeing little pieces of it as it was being trained up and fielded. It is a frightening idea, not only because of the Orwellian nature, but because of what it may portend for our nation.
I hope all the reported cases of gangstalking are mistaken identity or paranoia, but if you look at the bigger pattern, it could very easily fit in with an end of days scenario, which is why I spend the time I do here looking at surveillance. If something pops up which shows conclusively that the government is making a massive surveillance machine for the end of days, then we should be preparing to one, survive the end of days, and two, cope with the presence of a massive surveillance state as we do so.
If all goes according to plan here, not only will you acquire some interesting data regarding a critical survival skill, namely surveillance awareness, but you will also gain greater insight into the stability of our civilization, and what the future holds.