830 – Safety tips when traveling: Tom talks Electronic Security

Episode 830 – Electronic Security
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 830 of Screw the Commute podcast. Hey, we're going to talk a little bit about electronic security, especially if you're traveling. This episode kind of plays off my continued attention to satisfy both domestically and travel abroad. Your safety. I care about this, and a whole course on it is on brutalselfdefense.com. You won't believe some of the things that can happen to you, and you wouldn't even know what happened until it was too late if you don't listen to this episode and kind of get your head around the kind of things that are going on electronically that can screw you over. Okay. Hope you didn't miss episode 829. That was holiday improvement. I've been doing this for years. It's really helped my personal and professional improvement, and I can hear myself here as I'm a little bit scratchy with the sore throat. But the show must go on and then hope you too miss episode 828. That was a bunch of phone tips. All the kind of cool things you can do with your phone, with the latest updates of operating systems, and of course, any time you want to get to a bank episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, the episode number. Phone tips was 828. Holiday improvement 829 and today is 830. You'll probably want to pass this on to some of your colleagues, especially if they do a lot of traveling because it's just, well, where do you hear the kind of things that are happening to you? All right, check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com, and grab a copy of our automation ebook at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and you will thank me for it, because it's going to save you hundreds of hours into the future from fighting with your computer. And follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire.

[00:02:07] Okay, this episode is not so much about fighting attackers physically, as a lot of my brutal self-defense is. Of course, awareness is always a part of safety, so I'm a big proponent of that. But this one is about paying attention to your phones, your wallets. And yes, I said wallets, plural and your other communication devices and even what you wear on your head and how you wear your hair can be important. So why do I seem to sometimes obsess with safety? Well, I had the unfortunate or fortunate experience, depending on how you look at it, of experiencing the dark side of humanity. Now, I'm not saying I've experienced some of the atrocities of war, as we're presently seeing right now in the world. I'm just saying, I've survived over 100 violent encounters with people who would have been very happy to see me dead. That was when I was in the nightclub business. So I had to be hyper vigilant in that. There was little to no police support where I was, and it was pretty much every man for himself.

[00:03:14] Now that was a different life ago and certainly a different era where criminals actually went to jail. And there wasn't the technology that we have today that can be used for you or against you or by you or against you. That's what I'm honing in on today, especially when traveling internationally. But don't think for a moment you're immune to the types of things I'm going to talk about today. If you happen to live in the good old USA. For instance, were you aware there are things called cell site simulators? And that's kind of a common and generic name for them or Stingray devices. Stingray is probably actually a trademark of one of the companies that makes them so these simulators. Can pretend to be a cell tower, and your cell phone will log on to it and and see every, every one of you has a thing called an Imsi number that's a unique international mobile Subscriber Identifier. Again, sorry for my throat. It's a number. And it identifies you by your SIM card. And it tells the country, the network you're on all kinds of things that absolutely identify you. All right. And some of them have advanced features allowing them to intercept communications or even alter communications. That's how crazy it is. And some of these devices, these Stingray devices are passive, meaning they are totally undetectable. And they just grab cell phone communications out of the air and kind of like the radio in your car, right? It just pulls in those FM signals and you hear them.

[00:04:59] Other are active. They broadcast a signal that's stronger than the local cell tower, and that causes your phone to connect to them rather than the legitimate cell tower. That means all your communications can be intercepted and recorded. And law enforcement officers have used this information from these simulators to investigate all kinds of crimes and civil offenses. I put a thing in here, a link just to one article about Baltimore using these secret devices to catch people doing stuff. And I'm all for catching the bad guys. But you do have constitutional rights you have to consider, and we'll get to that in a minute. I mean, they've tracked kidnappers and they investigate robberies and and the Immigration and Customs Service uses them to arrest undocumented immigrants. Well, this was long before today's atmosphere. And police have used them at protests. You think there wasn't these things running on January 6th? I'll bet you they were. For those of you out of the country, that was when we had that that thing at the Capitol that they're all blaming on Trump. Now, these simulators or these stingrays are used by the FBI, the DEA, the NSA, the Secret Service, Ice, as well as the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, National Guard, US marshals, and the FBI. All right. Here's the thing. When they've been out for a long time, the article I sent you was from 2015.

[00:06:31] They've been out longer than that in around, I think 2021. They came up with the Congressional oversight commission, came up with a thing saying you had to get a warrant for these. But here's the thing. Except in emergency situations, well, who defines emergency? So it was called a cell site simulator warrant act of 2021. You can look it up. So here's the thing folks. Do you really think that all those agencies I just rattled off, especially in light of all the evidence coming out about them and all their covert activities, do you think they adhere strictly to the law? All right. You know what? If you do, I have a cell phone tower in the middle of the ocean I want to sell you. Right now, there are some apps like Snoop, snitch. To help you locate these kinds of things, but nobody has raved about how accurate they are and how could they be, especially if you're being surveilled by a passive device. Okay, so you might consider putting your phone and credit cards in a small, what they call Faraday bag to keep people from walking or sitting near you and using skimmers to grab your information. But that has nothing to do with these cell phone simulators. I mean, the bottom line is that you need to be darned careful what you say on or near your cell phone. And this is not third world stuff, although I'm going to address that now.

[00:08:03] If you're a US citizen and you travel outside the USA. Yes. What other countries don't have the same constitutional rights we have? And even here, those are getting shredded all the time. But outside the USA, they don't even exist. So here's what frequently happens when you travel somewhere. You're funneled through a checkpoint so that before you even enter the country, you're hit with facial recognition. That's why you might want to wear a hat, unless they make you take it off, or the way you wear your hair, those kinds of things, just to not make it as easy. On the facial recognition. I wouldn't wear a fake mustache. Right? That definitely gets you in trouble. And they do all kinds of electronic signature matching using these kinds of machines to track your electronics. Now they can actually identify your exact device. They can find the metadata of your calls like who you're dialing, how long you talked. They can actually intercept the text and voice calls and see your data usage and what websites you visited, just from walking through one little place in an airport. So again, bottom line. So only do the most innocuous stuff on your computer and your cell phone when you're not on your own home secure network. Even then, you've got to be careful. Now there's a thing called a VPN virtual private network that can help. They're cheap, but if you work for a big company, talk to your IT security people to see what you should be doing when corresponding with the Home Office so that it's secure as possible.

[00:09:43] I know. Now let's really talk turkey. You should have a burner phone. This is one of these prepaid phones you can get at 7-Eleven. And maybe an old, totally wiped clean version of your iPhone or Android that looks modern. And a drop wallet and a drop watch and jewelry. So a lot of these countries, if you have to use public transportation, let's say on a bus or a train, a couple of bad guys, this happens all the time, get on and threaten to kill you if you don't put your cell phone, wallet, jewelry and cash in the bag as they walk down the aisle. So here's what you do. Your real phone should be well hidden on your person and turned off, or at least on silent mode without vibration. That way. You put the old worthless phone in the bag. A drop wallet is one that has some expired credit cards, and maybe an old ID with an old address in it, maybe 20 or 40 bucks in cash and some costume jewelry and rings. And that should keep the bad guys happy enough so they don't shoot you to make an example out of you. You know, if you resist, they don't care. I mean, they're not going to get caught in some of these countries. Now, this is by no means a comprehensive treatise of staying electronically safe when traveling, or even in the United States or wherever you live.

[00:11:06] But I want you to start really thinking about the security of your devices and your correspondence, or business or personal. I mean, if you keep telling your kids that, you know, lock the doors because they're home alone and you're in some other country, you're just asking for a home invasion because those kids aren't going to be able to defend it or be sex trafficked or whatever. So this is really serious stuff. It's not it's not any kind of paranoia here. This stuff happens all the time. If you really want to get scared, watch that movie called Taken with Liam Neeson. All right. But of course, you could be just like Hillary Clinton and be talking about yoga classes and wedding planning, right? But 30,000 emails or so, and then you've got nothing to worry about, right? So again, be very careful what you say on or near your cell phone. The walls are listening. Whew. All right, folks, I hope this gave you a little bit to think about. And you can research all of this stuff by typing in Stingray cell phone simulators and all the kinds of things that you could be doing to protect yourself electronically. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Again, sorry for the rough voice, but the show must go on. Catch you later.