The Five Steps of Operational Security – an Assessment

Kevin Hayden – TruthisTreason.net

Source: Survival Blog by Stone of Scone

Operational Security (OPSEC) is the evaluation and control of any critical information that could be used against you by an adversary. The result of good OPSEC is the elimination or withholding of the most damaging information that your adversary has the ability to gather and understand how to use against you. OPSEC happens everyday. When you go on vacation and hold your mail and newspaper delivery, and use timers to turn your radio and lights on and off to make it appear that you are home, you are practicing good OPSEC.

Here is a another example of OPSEC -

A business contact I had worked as the Information Systems Director for the Department of Corrections in a populous state in the US. When he was at his office near the State Capitol, he wore a tie, nice shoes, and a business suit. But when he had to travel to the prisons, he would dress in jeans, tennis shoes, a faded work shirt, and would drive a State vehicle to and from the prison. He did not want the prisoners to know his appearance, or information about his personal car or license plate number. The reason is that he had intelligence that certain criminals said they were going to kidnap the Information System Director, as they thought he had access to the computer system and could lower their sentences by altering the computer files. Even though the computer system was set so that no one person could change anyone’s sentence, the implications for this man and his family were the same. Some jobs, especially those dealing with criminals, require a lot of OPSEC in safeguarding your personal information. Once your information is compromised due to poor OPSEC, it is hard to ever regain it.

This last year I had the privilege to read my father-in-law’s letters to his wife while he was a sailor during WWII. Each letter was stamped as approved by a Navy censor, and never once did he reveal his location, or his ship’s location. He would state that the weather is better here, not as cold, the harbor is beautiful, but never so much as a hint of his location. Even the return address on the envelope was from a State-side mailing address, as the Navy made sure their ships could not be tracked. The Navy coined the term “Loose Lips – Sinks Ships”, and studying the US Military’s OPSEC procedures is a great exercise for anyone.

So how do we apply the military’s OPSEC principles to our personal situation? What is the process? The steps for developing your own OPSEC are:

Step 1. Make a list of any critical information you have that can be used by an adversary.

Step 2. Determine who your adversaries are.

Step 3. Look at all the ways your critical information can be compromised.

Step 4. Make an assessment and rate the items of information that are the most likely to be used by your adversary, and what countermeasures you can employ.

Step 5. Consistently employ your countermeasures and other security for your most vulnerable assets, in priority order from the results of step 4.

The First Step is to make a short list of critical information, which for my situation is:

(a) My name, SSN, and date of birth (can be used for identity theft and other purposes).
(b) Bank and credit card information that could allow someone to fraudulently access my funds.
(c) My bank statements that show all of the purchases I have made, and any groups I fund or support.
(d) My garbage, which has old envelopes with their addresses still intact, and many personal items that reveal a wealth of information. (There was a group in Washington DC that would empty the garbage cans of powerful people, such as Henry Kissinger and others, and report the interesting items they found. Quite a find, and there are very few laws against taking someone’s garbage.) The correct OPSEC for garbage is to [shred or] burn it, or take it to the landfill, instead of leaving it on the curb awaiting pickup.
(e) My home address.
(f) Information on any real estate or other large assets I own.
(g) A picture of what I look like.
(h) The number of guns and ammo I own and where they are located.
(i) The amount of food and other survival gear I have accumulated, and where they are located.
(j) The interior layout of my home, and its contents.

Hayden’s Note:

Additional items to consider are items such as precious metals and long-term food storage - Do people know that you own physical gold, silver, coins and other valuables?  And if so, what steps have you taken to minimize this or conceal them?

The Second Step is to determine who are your adversaries. Everyone has different circumstances, but a general rule that would help identify your adversaries is to determine the types of controversy you are involved in. You may need someone else to look at you objectively and tell you what are the controversial areas of your life that make you visible to predators. For the more controversy you create the more visible you become, and your controversy will draw those that oppose you.

Some things that cause controversy are:
(1) Having more visible wealth than your neighbors or peers,
(2) Supporting and holding allegiance to various controversial groups in a public manner.
(3) The purchase, display and use of military style guns in a region where people do not understand the need for the 2nd Amendment.
(4) Openly using military grade equipment, such as dressing in fatigues or driving old Army trucks.
(5) Campaigning for election to a political office, or influencing the political process in a significant way.
(6) Having a national presence of some type, such as producing popular videos on YouTube, or having a popular radio talk show or website. 
(7) Having a lifestyle that is unacceptable to other people. An example would be the polygamous marriages practiced by the Fundamental Latter Day Saints.

Just as your personal OPSEC assessment should always consider how your information is viewed at present, a good assessment should consider how your information may be used against you in the future. When you begin to engage in items of public controversy, the amount of public information you have revealed in the past will become critical. The best OPSEC is to keep amount of public information about you at the lowest possible level, as many people have so much information in the public domain that it is impossible to do anything about it once they become controversial. You should consider your public information and your potential adversaries before you become involved in a controversial area.

The Third Step in developing your OPSEC assessment is to look at all of the ways your critical information can be compromised and used by the adversaries identified in step two.

Using LinkedIn may be good for business, and having a FaceBook account may be good for friends, but they can be really bad OPSEC. What you look like, your views and outlooks, and a list of all of your friends and business contacts are available to anyone that can access your account. YouTube videos, web sites, and other Internet activity provide a tremendous amount of information that can direct attention to you and cause problems with your OPSEC.

A good example of how critical information is compromised on the Internet is the case of the Hutaree Militia, who put their paramilitary training videos on YouTube. This raised their profile, and is probably the reason the Hutarees were infiltrated by a government agent. I don’t think these people are more than talk, but their paramilitary training videos were very aggressive and probably frightened some people. The statements of the government infiltrator resulted with their arrests, even though they may have done nothing wrong. Paramilitary exercises are perfectly legal [in most jurisdictions], but should be done in secret as they can make you appear to be threatening to many people. You only have to “look” like you are dangerous to encounter problems, and good OPSEC should conceal all information of this type.

Another way your personal information is compromised to a potential adversary is through your property deed information, which is posted by your tax assessor’s office on the Internet. A lawyer or anyone else can look up your name, how many parcels of land you own and what they are worth, and what types of buildings or other improvements have been made. Not only can someone find out where you live but they can tell if your home is free and clear of all debts. Having a house that has a lot of equity can make you appear to be rich enough to be a target of a lawsuit. To protect yourself, you will need to obscure your public ownership information.

To do this, you will have put the ownership of your home into a trust or partnership that hides your name on the tax records. This is crucial to avoiding a lawsuit, as lawyers routinely use the property assessor’s tax records on the Internet to look for the assets of anyone their clients intend to sue. If you have a lot of known assets and the lawyer thinks he can win the case, the lawyer’s proposed fee for his client will be to split the proceeds of the lawsuit that will come from the court’s judgment against your assets. This way, it won’t cost his client a dime to sue you. But if the public records do not reveal any ownership of real estate and other assets, the lawyer will demand his fee “up front” from his client before he will press a lawsuit against you. This will stop 99% of all lawsuits from ever being brought against you. Lawsuits are hardly ever brought against those that appear to be insolvent, because the lawyers and their clients are not likely to be able to recover their lawyer fees.

A good example of real estate lost due to compromised OPSEC is the lawsuit brought against Operation Ranch Rescue, a controversial group that provided security to farmers along the Mexican border. One of the owners of Ranch Rescue had a large farm in Arizona, apparently listed in the owner’s name. Ranch Rescue was sued on the behalf of illegal immigrants by the SPLC, who set the damages slightly greater than the assessed value of the owner’s farm. Their lawsuit was successful, and the ranch was taken to satisfy the judgment the court laid on the owner. If the owner had practiced good OPSEC and had put his ranch in a trust, the outcome may have been different.

I have a friend that is a wealthy real estate appraiser, and is often involved in local politics concerning the properties that he owns. He has been sued by county developers and other rascals for ridiculous reasons. He did not want to put his home in an irrevocable trust, so to protect his home from lawyers, he had a good friend file a large lien at the courthouse against his home for more than the property is worth. His friend also gave him a signed and undated quitclaim deed to terminate the lien, which the appraiser keeps in his safe. This makes him appear to have no equity in the property. When the appraiser wants to sell his home, he can file the signed quitclaim deed at the courthouse which will void the lien against the property at any time. None of the appraiser’s vehicles are titled in his name, but are titled in his company’s name, which is not directly tied to him. His other assets are handled the same way. When a lawyer researches the appraiser’s assets, he appears to be insolvent, and so is protected from almost all lawsuits. Using a temporary lien would be one type of OPSEC when you cannot hide your ownership. Some of the best protection of your information from your adversaries is to obscure it with disinformation.

Another way your personal information can be compromised is when you don’t know the background of people who suddenly befriend you. This has been the downfall of many people. Randy Weaver had visited a controversial group, and his OPSEC should have been to give everyone there a nickname or something besides his correct name. His next problem in OPSEC was to make friends with a government agent who was trying to infiltrate the group. This agent convinced Weaver to saw off a shotgun for him down to the legal limit. The agent then accused Weaver of sawing the shotgun barrel too short to be legal. The government used this to pressure Weaver to spy on the controversial group or face jail, and Weaver would not spy on the group, or come down from his home when a arrest warrant was issued for sawing off the shotgun. The lapses of OPSEC of using his real name and not investigating his new friend (and almost everyone has made the same mistakes) led to the standoff where Weaver’s son and wife were killed by the government. Weaver was not at fault and won a civil judgment against the government, but that doesn’t change the outcome. If you are involved with a controversial group, or have new friends that want to involve you in firearms, the lesson for all of us in this time of universal corruption is that we need to increase or evaluate our OPSEC. It may be legal to own guns and participate in groups that are under government investigation, but this is a deadly combination

Even friends that you trust, combined with guns, can be deadly. Those who are friends today can be your enemies tomorrow, and report to others your level of gun ownership, which will compromise your OPSEC. Consider the Branch Davidians in Waco Texas, who were first brought to attention of law enforcement by the complaints of a former member. This was followed by a damaging series of articles written by the local newspaper. Another incident that raised their profile was their mail order gun parts business. One package they ordered by US Mail had dummy hand grenades and other firearm parts. The carton was somehow opened at the Post Office, and law enforcement was notified. This incident, as well as the large number of guns the Branch Davidians were legally purchasing, and the complaints from neighbors of the sound of guns being fired on their property, brought them to the attention of the ATF.

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