Camera obscura
How hard can it be to live off the grid?
When I arrive to meet former City of London counterterrorism chief Brett Lovegrove, he warns me I am being watched. On the short walk over to Westminster from the offices in Victoria, I will, according to Lovegrove, have been recorded on CCTV every step of the way. My Tube journey that morning would have been privy to some of the 16,000 cameras that map every movement on the London Underground network.
And then there are all the other details of my life circulating in texts and emails, and on social media, that can be harvested with a few clicks. “This,” Lovegrove says, leaning forward so that his perfectly bald head glints under the spotlight and his polka-dot tie and braces swim before my eyes, “tells me almost everything about you.”
It is a somewhat intimidating way to begin an interview, not least since, to his right, nods another security specialist, Capt David Blakeley, a former commander in the secretive British military unit the Pathfinders, comprising the cream of the Parachute Regiment. But knowing what we are up to is what these men do best.
Both are part of a team of a few dozen security specialists who appear in a new Channel 4 series,
Hunted, which begins next month. The premise is simple: 14 ordinary people flee their lives and try to live “off grid” for a month while evading capture. The hunters, commanded by Lovegrove, begin with only the names, addresses, photographs and dates of birth of the escapees, and attempt to track them down.
To locate their targets, they may use all the surveillance mechanisms available to the British security services, including CCTV footage (there are up to six million cameras nationwide), automatic number-plate recognition, and phone and email records. For anybody unsure of how effective this is, it is worth bearing in mind the photograph jokingly tweeted – and hastily deleted – last month by the National Police Air Service of comedian Michael McIntyre standing in Leicester Square. Although it was taken from thousands of feet above, McIntyre is instantly recognisable.
The central question the programme raises is one of the most pertinent of our times: whether it is possible to avoid the all-seeing eye of the surveillance state. As is the obvious follow-up: if not, how worried should we be?
For Lovegrove, who retired from the police in 2008 and now heads several companies specialising in counterterrorism and surveillance, the answer is much, much more than we currently seem to be – particularly over the lax scattering of our lives online.
During filming, much of the tracking was done simply through mining so-called “open-source information”. This is the personal data that we wittingly or unwittingly put out in the public domain and is available for anybody to do with as they wish, be they hacker or firms such as Google and Microsoft.
“I got involved with the programme because I wanted to raise people’s awareness about the information footprints they build for themselves,” he says. “WhatsApp, Instagram, emails, mobile phones, absolutely everything we use all the time. What people are doing is creating an information footprint that they then don’t, I believe, take sufficient care of to protect themselves.
“Society should be now more involved in understanding what the state can do and be more invested in this than it is. I don’t want people to wake up in five years and say, ‘Blooming hell, this is a monster’, but to play a part in shaping it.”
People with iPhones may not know that a programme called Frequent Locations buried in its privacy settings maps not just their every movement, but also the time and date they move.
However, this surveillance extends far beyond our smartphones. “Smart” meters collate our electricity and water usage, and smart fridges and Wi-Fi-equipped coffee machines know what we eat and drink.
Dr Richard Tynan, of Privacy International, which monitors government surveillance, calls this “the pattern of life”.
“It’s becoming increasingly impossible to escape creating some form of record about what you are doing and leave some form of trail that a company or government can hone in on to try and track you,” he says.
Thanks to wearable technology such as Fitbits and watches equipped with heart-rate monitors, Dr Tynan, who was consulted for the programme, says technology is now also being used to track our emotions.
“You can detect whether somebody is excited or down. This is all sold under the guise of cool things we can do, but the information they collect becomes a pot of gold for government, companies and hackers to mine and potentially do nasty things with. People need to be aware of these threats, and if the’re not, the consequences can be quite dire. The trajectory we are on will essentially lead to total information awareness by any third party that wants access.”
Whether anybody escaped the hunters is a closely guarded secret, and when I try to extract it from Blakeley, I am quickly put in my place: “I am trained in deception,” he says with a smile I don’t quite believe.
The contestants dispersed to all corners of Britain, and quickly adapted to being on the run. They bought cheap “burner” phones – although even these can be traced – and were careful with the special bank accounts they were given for the series as each time it was used, it flagged up their position. Often, false signals were sent.
“It is possible to stay off the grid, but it is getting increasingly harder every year, particularly as the powers of the state seem to be increasing,” Blakeley says.
The main challenge to staying off grid remains – so the experts say – human frailty. People cannot resist getting in touch with family and friends, even though they know it can give the game away.
“The more time you are on your own, the more likely you are to make mistakes and the more affected you become by paranoia as well,” Blakeley says.
We are undone, in the end, by our need for contact, and that same desire to share and communicate online may be dismantling our freedoms. Big Brother isn’t just watching – he is one step behind and gaining.
Hunted begins on Thursday September 10 on Channel 4 at 9pm