The Anti-Surveillance State: Clothes and Gadgets Block Face Recognition Technology, Confuse Drones and Make You (Digitally) Invisible. -- Tom
I'm not optimistic. The visual stuff screams "I'm trying to hide!" far too loudly. And the DNA guide is all about sharing DNA with another person. Even if it's a few other persons, that's not very useful.
A little off topic but I ran into someone trying to sell a typewriter today. The seller wanted a bit too much for my budget but I liked him enough to give out the secret of selling a manual typewriter in the 21st century: Bring up the NSA. This is kind of interesting but they'll have to come up with something that blends in a bit more in a fashion sense.
I think the visual stuff is for use at demonstrations etc where they try to identify everyone who attended.
If they bug your house (possibly through your cell phone), they can still make out what you're typing by simply listening to the sounds the typewriter makes And they're much louder than a computer keyboard.
That would make them have to really work and each typewriter has different sounds. Blasting some loud rock and roll while you type could be very effective. And then they would have to bone up on WWII and cold war era espionage techniques and learn how to intercept letters and steam them open and reseal them without leaving a trace.
One could go old school. Use paper, pen and pencil And carbon paper, and mimeograph machines. Use indexed microfiche for information storage.
From what I know, it's not so much the sound of the typewriter- they can correlate the distance between keys pressed by sound (somewhat analogous to echolocation) and thus infer what you're typing. Also, each key is going to make a distinctive sound when pressed, and thus they can find out which sound corresponds to which key by simply analyzing their frequency of occurence compared to their frequency in the English language (the most common sound they'll hear should be "e" or space). All this is achieved by computer algorithms that can figure this out very quickly and accurately. And cops have been able to filter out ambient sounds like music for decades now, butmaybe the proverbial monkey at a typewriter sitting next to you would help! Opening and resealing most letters isn't exactly rocket science, they've been able to do that flawlessly for ages. Maybe some tamper evident seal would complicate things. Realistically, unless you're a foreign spy or Mafia don, you won't have to worry about 99% of this!
My personal objective is to reduce cheap mass surveillance on me, which I view as a big threat because of false positives, and to some extent because I've lost substantial trust in my government and authorities (sadly). So, rather than resort to typewriters or the fashion statements in the OP, I think I'll be wearing a sombrero and mirror glasses - cool or what! Regarding the keystroke timing issue online, I have been thinking about a little utility that feeds keystrokes to browsers with jitter or set timings. Probably jitter is better as it makes it less obvious what you're doing.
If you're the only one wearing sombrero and mirror glasses, you will be easily identified. I say, we all should start wearing them
True but it is still a bit more work and not as easy as mass storage of your internet communications so, as you said, you would have to be specifically targeted before such extreme surveillance techniques are used against you. That is the issue with NSA mass surveillance, your communication is being intercepted and looked at with no probable cause whatsoever just due to the medium you are using.