Protecting Yourself and Others – Page 7

Calling the Police is Dangerous

Most situations can only be made worse by involving the police. For example, if somebody breaks into your home and you shoot them the situations has concluded. Unless the police show up. Then they might gun you down:

Huntsville police spokesman Lt. Darryl Lawson tells AL.com the woman’s estranged husband came into the house she shared with her mother armed with a gun Sunday afternoon. The woman opened fire with a shotgun, wounding him.

Her mother called 911 and when police arrived, they heard gunshots and saw the woman in the garage holding the shotgun. They demanded she drop the weapon and when she turned toward them with the gun in her hand, at least one officer fired.

Officers say the estranged husband’s injuries are life threatening. The woman is expected to survive.

I’m sure some will put the blame on the woman for “turning towards the police” but we need to remember that that claim is from the officers who are most likely trying to cover their asses. Either way the woman would have been better off shooting her estranged husband, leaving the house, and then calling the police so she wouldn’t be around when one of those trigger happy fucks decides to get his rocks off by blasting an innocent bystander.

Never call the police unless not doing so could hold terrible legal liability. In those cases make sure you’re away from the immediate area so the police won’t assume you’re a bad guy who they can shoot at will.

How Not to Defend Yourself

Contrary to what many opponents to legalized self-defense claim there are many instances of individuals successfully defending themselves every day. From the aware individual who managed to avoid a violent situation by crossing a street at the right time to the individual who regretfully had to draw their concealed firearm and shoot their attacker successful incidents of self-defense are all around us. But there are people who mistake self-defense for vengeance. This story that happened in St. Paul is an example of vengeance:

Last night around 5:30 p.m. two armed robbers approached a man near the Hmongtown Marketplace at Como and Pennsylvania Avenues in St. Paul’s North End.

He pulled out a gun and exchanged shots with the would-be robbers.

Everything up to this point qualified as self-defense. Two armed robbers certainly make for a case where their target can reasonably assume that their life is in immediate jeopardy and lethal force is therefore justified. However the defender wasn’t satisfied with stopping there:

Then, when the robbers jumped in their car and tried to escape, he hopped in his car and chased them for more than a mile down Thomas Avenue.

Self-defense ends with the threat does. Once your attackers flee you can no longer claim self-defense if you continue responding aggressively. In this case the defender became the attacker when he chased down the fleeing robbers and engaged in a second gunfight with them.

I encourage everybody to learn skills that make them more able to defend themselves. Knowledge is one of those skills. You need to know the laws regarding self-defense otherwise you may end in a cage.

Abusers Installing Spyware on Their Victims’ Computers

Last month I briefly mentioned the importance of full disk encryption. Namely it prevents the contents of the hard drive from being altered unless one knows the decryption key. I had to deal with a friend’s significant other installing spyware on her system in order to keep tabs on who she was talking to and what she was doing. Her significant other didn’t know her login credentials but since her hard drive wasn’t encrypted he was able to install the spyware with a boot disk. This threat model isn’t out of the ordinary. In fact it is becoming worryingly common:

Helplines and women’s refuge charities have reported a dramatic rise in the use of spyware apps to eavesdrop on the victims of domestic violence via their mobiles and other electronic devices, enabling abusers clandestinely to read texts, record calls and view or listen in on victims in real time without their knowledge.

The Independent has established that one device offering the ability to spy on phones is being sold by a major British high-street retailer via its website. The proliferation of software packages, many of which are openly marketed as tools for covertly tracking a “cheating wife or girlfriend” and cost less than £50, has prompted concern that police and the criminal justice system in Britain are failing to understand the extent of the problem and tackle offenders.

A survey by Women’s Aid, the domestic violence charity, found that 41 per cent of domestic violence victims it helped had been tracked or harassed using electronic devices. A second study this year by the Digital Trust, which helps victims of online stalking, found that more than 50 per cent of abusive partners used spyware or some other form of electronic surveillance to stalk their victims.

As a general rule security is assumed to be broken when an adversary has physical access. But that isn’t always the case. It really depends on how technically capable a threat is. Oftentimes in cases of domestic abuse the abuser is not technically savvy and relies on easy to procure and use tools to perform monitoring.

Full disk encryption, while not a magic bullet, is pretty effective at keeping less technically capable threats from altering a drive’s contents without the owner’s knowledge. When encrypting the contents of a hard drive is not possible, either due to technical limitations or the threat of physical violence, the Tails Linux live distribution is a good tool. Tails is being developed to maintain user anonymity and leave a few traces as possible that it was used. All Internet traffic on Tails is pumped through Tor, which prevents a threat monitoring your network from seeing what you’re looking at or who you’re talking to (but does not disguise the fact that you’re using Tor). That can enable a victim to communicate securely with an individual or group that can help. Since Tails boots from a USB stick or CD it can be easily removed and concealed.

As monitoring tools becomes easier to use, cheaper, and more readily available the need to learn computer security will become even greater. After all, the National Security Agency (NSA) isn’t the only threat your computer environment may be facing. Domestic abusers, corrupt (or “legitimate”) law enforcers, land lords, bosses, and any number of other people may with to spy on you for various reasons.

When the Cloud is More Secure

I’ve annoyed a great many electrons explaining how to free yourself from “the cloud” (online services controlled by the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google). The reason I advocate individuals use self-hosted services is because it’s more difficult for creepers like the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect all of your data. As an anarchist the state is one of the most common malicious attackers in my threat models. But after gaining some experience helping somebody deal with a surveillance happy significant other I’ve finally had to consider other threat models. Namely models involving local threats. This is where “the cloud” comes in.

Consider a domestic abuse situation. The threat is likely going to be somebody who lives with you and therefore has physical access to your devices. Physical access is the death knell of any security setup (although with encrypted data storage the difficult of exploitation, assuming the threat isn’t using rubber hose cryptanalysis, has greatly increased) so what can you do? Move your data to “the cloud” and access it with anonymizing tools.

The last part is very important. If you access your “cloud” data from your normal machine using the standard tools there will be records left all over the place. However, if you use something like a Tails boot disk, which doesn’t write anything to any storage media by default and pumps all Internet traffic through Tor to render local network monitoring tools impotent, there will be very little evidence of you having created or access any data (although Tor doesn’t hide the fact that you’re using Tor, which is something to keep in mind if your network is being monitored locally).

In a situation where the data you create could agitate your threat it’s best to make sure that data is hidden. I haven’t really had time to go over the finer details of this threat model so what I’m writing here is simply a very brief introduction to something I’ve had to consider recently. Much more work is necessary on my part and I will try to post updates of what I come up with in the hopes it can help other people.

Why Military and Police Credentials Don’t Impress Me in Self-Defense Instructors

How many self-defense instructors brag bout their military of police credentials? Based on what I’ve seen the number is pretty high. And for good reason. A lot of regular old jerk offs seem to view military and police credentials as the thing to look for when deciding on a self-defense course. The more research I do in the field of self-defense the more I’m convinced the military and police credentials are pretty useless from a civilian standpoint.

On the surface seeking military and police credentials makes sense. When it comes to violence those are the two professions that are most likely to be familiar with it. But those professions also exist in a realm that is entirely separate from what use regular jerk offs exist in.

First, let’s consider tactics. Many regular jerk offs seem to believe that military and police tactics are the most effective tactics when it comes to self-defense. What they never stop to consider is that military tactics especially and police tactics to a lesser degree assuming personnel are working in teams. A lot of military and police tactics for individual personnel rely on variations of waiting for backup. As a regular jerk off we’re unlikely to have backup coming our way so that tosses out a lot of military and police tactics.

Second, liability. Military and police tactics have been developed in a realm where liability is far more limited. Both military and police personnel can get away with things that would land us regular jerk offs in a cage or, at the very least, on the receiving end of a nasty lawsuit. When a solider screws up he usually has the military ready to stand by his side, so long as he was following order. Police often receive little more than a slap on the wrist and a paid vacation when they do something egregious. Therefore their tactics have much more leeway than our own. Shock and awe work well when you’re raiding an enemy stronghold or a drug house but it’s a completely unacceptable tactic when you’re a civilian.

Third, military and personnel tactics often make assumptions about available equipment that us regular jerk offs don’t have. Consider the equipment a solider often has on his person. They usually have a rifle and a good number of space magazines, sometimes have a side arm and body armor, and often have access to greater firepower in the form of grenades and airstrikes. Police usually have a handgun, baton, pepper spray, and a Taser on their person. Oftentimes police officers will be wearing body armor and either have a rifle on hand or one very nearby. What does the average jerk off have? If they’re fortunate they live somewhere where they can legally carry a firearm, which will usually give them access to a handgun. Should have have a handgun on their person they would be smart to have at least some spare ammunition on hand. Beyond a handgun the equipment an average jerk off will have available is scant and may include pepper spray and a folding knife but will most often consist of a wallet and car keys.

There are many other reasons why I don’t see military and police credentials as important when looking for a self-defense instructor. But those are the three biggest. With all of that said, military and police credentials don’t imply an instructor is bad. It just doesn’t mean that the instructor is good.

Are You Defending Your Physical Person or Your Ego

Self-defense is a complex topic. Between skills, philosophy, and legal issues involved one could write an entire encyclopedia on the subject and not even begin to scratch the surface.

I’ve written quite a few posts talking about the idea of appropriate responses. That is how much force, if any, is proper in specific situations. But today I feel like writing about something a bit different. Consider this video. The video started off, supposedly, as one of those YouTube pranks where somebody acts like a raging asshole at random people and laughs at the response. In this case the person acting like a raging asshole slapped another person in the face with a piece of pizza. Unlike most of the YouTube pranks you see this one did not end well for the prankster since he got punched in the face.

I’m not going to lie, I rather enjoyed watching the prankster get slugged. If you play stupid games you will win stupid prizes and I’m rather tired of these YouTube pranks that more resemble assaults than fun and games.

But a worthy question to ask is whether the person who slugged the prankster was defending himself. As I obtained this link via Reddit I already read through a length debate over whether incident was self-defense or not. Assuming one considers it self-defense (I don’t but bear with me) the next question that comes to mind is, was the guy who slugged the prankster defending his physical person or his ego?

This is something to consider. Some self-defense situations seem to more accurate reflect an individual with hurt feelings retaliating against the person who hurt his feelings. Situations where one individual shoved another only to be punched in the case for doing so, in my opinion, is an example of ego defense than self-defense.

Self-defense, in my opinion, involves defending your physical self. Ego, on the other hand, has no place in a self-defense situations (again, in my opinion). My reasoning is that physical harm can lead to potentially long-term negative side-effects or death whereas a bruised ego can lead to butthurtness and whining. When you enter into a physical confrontation the risk of injury or death is always there. Therefore, in my opinion, is best to avoid physical confrontations at all costs. A hurt ego won’t lead to injury or death unless it turns into a physical confrontation. Do you really want to be the one to turn a situation that resulted in you being butthurt into one that may result in you actually getting hurt?

Warning Shots are Never a Good Idea

There is a lot of bad self-defense advice out there. One of the more frequently recycled pieces of bad self-defense advice is to fire warming shots in an attempt to scare away a threat. This advice is commonly given by individuals who don’t understand self-defense laws and vice presidents (but I repeat myself). A man is now facing the consequences of following bad self-defense advice:

Chris Harris said he was coming from church when he and his girlfriend were surrounded by nine men looking for a fight. He said men made threats and the couple was scared for their lives, but Harris explained he was the one that ended up in cuffs. And facing some pretty serious charges.

“It was one of the most scariest experiences I have ever been though,” said CC Roxby, Harris’ fiancé.

“They surrounded me saying some pretty vulgar things like they were going to rape my wife in front of me, cut me,” Harris said.

Roxby said she called 911, but one man continued to be aggressive.

“The kid kept advancing on me, saying it wasn’t a real gun, and I would much rather shoot a shot into the air to prevent them from attacking me rather than them attacking me and me shooting someone,” Harris said.

“The cruisers were coming down the street at that point and the young men ran away,” Roxby said. “Instead of them following the gang, the officers arrested Chris for firing a shot into the air.”

Some people are probably asking what the living fuck is going on here. Let me explain. Warning shots are a bad idea both defensively and legally. Defensively a warming shot is a loose round, which means where it lands is anybody’s guess. That’s a major risk to innocent bystanders.

Legally speaking warning shots take away your claim of being in immediate fear of death or great bodily harm. By firing warning shots you legally admit that you believed the situation could be resolves with something less than lethal force in that moment so employing a lethal weapon was not warranted. In other words, legally speaking, if you use a firearm you damn well better believe that lethal force is the only option left to you to preserve your life.

Based on the description of the situation, nine aggressive opponents against two individuals, I would argue that lethal force was certainly warranted. But firing a warning shot was not because of the potential risk it put innocent bystanders in.

Two Different Ways of Responding to Threats

I’ve been talking about threat models lately and how people respond to them. Most recently I discussed Sarkeesian canceling her event at Utah State University because the police were unwilling to prohibit individuals with valid carry permits from carrying at the event.

Looking at threat models and responses at a very high level there seems to be two types of reactions. The first, which Sarkeesia demonstrated, is a reaction that attempts to control the threat while the second reaction type is an attempt to harden the threat’s target.

Let’s consider a threat model commonly discussed here, individuals facing the potential of being murdered. Gun control advocates look at the model and identify the threat and focus on controlling that threat. In their eyes the threat is an armed aggressor and their reaction is to attempt to restrict their access to arms. A gun rights advocates look at the model and identify the threat and focus on hardening the target. For them the threat is an armed or unarmed aggressor and their reaction is to attempt to ensure that the target is equipped with a means to defend against the aggressor.

Obviously I’m of the thought that an appropriate response to an aggressor is to harden the target. The reason I subscribe to this school of thought is that the target is the factor in the model that you can control whereas the threat is not controllable. If somebody threatens to kill me I can take measures that make carrying through with that threat difficult. Some of the actions I can take is to train in martial arts (which, in my opinion, includes firearm training), carry a weapon to defend myself with, wear body armor to make certain types of attacks less effective, randomize the routes I take to go from home to work, install audible alarms on my doors and windows, carry a bright flashlight that can be used to blind an aggressor, etc. These are all things that I can do.

But what can I do to control the threat? Truthfully there really isn’t anything I can do in that respect. Laws are ineffective against the unlawful. Since committing murder is already illegal it seems unlikely that the threat will abide by any laws that attempt to restrict his or her access to arms. Furthermore weapons are simple things to construct so even if the laws decrease the amount of available weapons the threat can craft his or her own. There is also no reliable way for me to control when the threat will attack me. This is an interesting point in regards to Sarkeesia’s situation. While the threat that was issued said that the attack would occur at the campus there is no way to know that the issued threat wasn’t disinformation meant to throw the target off. The threat could very well attack when Sarkeesia made her way from the airport or hotel she was likely starting at to the campus or after she left the campus.

I would argue that any threat model response that relies on controlling the threat will be ineffective. Short of killing the threat there is no way to absolutely control his or her actions. But even killing them requires that you can first identify them, which is often not possible until the threat makes a move against you. This is why any competent security team focuses on protecting the target. Whether you’re talking body guards, building security, or computer security the focus is always to harden the target.

Stand Your Ground Should Apply to the Home

South Carolina passed a law that removed people’s duty to retreat when attack in a place they have a right to be at. This law, common referred to as stand your ground, is usually seen as a companion to the law that says you do not have to retreat from your home if somebody breaks in, which is usually referred to as castle doctrine. Whitlee Jones, a woman residing in South Carolina, recently made the news because she stabbed her abusive boyfriend and was eventually charged with murder. Her lawyer attempted to use the stand your ground law to argue that her actions were self-defense:

Whitlee Jones screamed for help as her boyfriend pulled her down the street by her hair. Her weave fell from her head and onto the pavement.

A neighbor heard Jones’ cries and dialed 911 on that night in November 2012.

But the scuffle ended before a North Charleston policeman arrived and asked Jones’ boyfriend what happened. Eric Lee, 29, said their argument over a cellphone had never turned physical. The officer left.

A short time later, Jones went back to the home where she lived with Lee. She planned to pack up and leave for good.

But after Jones gathered her things, Lee stepped in front of her. Though authorities later contended that Lee didn’t attack her, Jones said he shook her and blocked her way out, so she pulled a knife and stabbed him once. Lee died, and Jones was arrested for murder.

Nearly two years later, a judge found earlier this month that Jones, now 25, had a right to kill Lee under the S.C. Protection of Persons and Property Act, which allows people in certain situations to use force when faced with serious injury. But to the 9th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, Jones is not the kind of person legislators had in mind when they passed the “stand your ground” law in 2006. It does not apply to housemates in episodes of domestic violence, the prosecutors argued.

Stand your ground laws dictate that one has a right to defend themselves from aggression wherever they have a right to be. I would argue that one has a right to be in their home so understand stand your ground laws should have a right to defend themselves. Furthermore I’ve never seen a stand your ground law that made an exception if your attacker was a husband, boyfriend, or housemate. Based on her boyfriend’s earlier actions that precipitated their neighbor calling 911 I would say she had reason to believe he meant her further harm when he attempted to block her exit.

In truth self-defense shouldn’t be location or aggressor dependent. It shouldn’t matter if you’re at home, at work, or out and about and it shouldn’t matter if your attacker is a complete stranger, a neighbor, or a significant other. If you are attacked you should have a legal right to defend yourself.

More Sheepdog Stupidity

Why I bother venturing out into the Internet is beyond me. But to add another feather to my hat that sees the whole sheep, wolf, sheepdog analogy as corrosive and meant solely to jerk off the egos of insecure gun owners I now have this gem of an exchange:

Self-Proclaimed Sheepdog: “The difference between a sheep and a sheepdog is that a sheepdog runs towards the gunfight!”

Me: “Personally I find gunfights to be a hazard to my health and try to avoid them.”

Self-Proclaimed Sheepdog: “And that’s why you’re a sheep. You want to carry the gun but you can’t handle the responsibility that comes with it.”

Me: “If you were walking down the street and heard gunfire being exchanged between two groups would you run towards it?”

Self-Proclaimed Sheepdog: “You’re goddamn right I would!”

Me: “Well then you’re what I like to refer to as a self-correcting problem.”

In addition to being a self-correcting problem this individual also suffers from a hero complex. Not surprisingly there is a positive correlation between people who talk about running towards a gunfight and a rather tragic form of situational color blindness where anything other than black or white situations fail to register. I imagine most of the scenarios concocted in self-proclaimed sheepdogs’s heads is based on a simple pattern of first the neo-Nazi skinhead walks into a mall and announced “I am a neo-Nazi skinhead! I intent to murder all of you in cold blood without any reason! I am going to commence murdering you now!”, begins shooting, gets shot by the heroic sheepdog that ran towards him like all sheepdogs do, and all of the hot women in the mall have sex with their savior (and later all of the hot women on his Facebook friends list who read about his heroism have sex with him).

Defensive situations are seldom that black and white. What’s more likely is that our sheepdog will hear the sound of gun fire, run towards it, realize that it’s a complete clusterfuck where the good guys and bad guys are indiscernible, and end up getting shot dead by a stray bullet because he was stupid enough to run towards a gunfight.

Self-proclaimed sheepdogs like to act superior because they seem themselves as paragons of all that is right and proper in the world. As individuals of such high moral character it is up to them to defend all of the stupid sheep. That means running towards any situation that might involve wolves eating sheep. What these paragons of all that is right and proper fail to consider is that any confrontation is potentially hazardous to your health. I don’t know about them but there are people in my life who want me alive. Since I really like these people I don’t want to disappoint them by dying needlessly, which means I’m going to run towards any gunfights. Furthermore I know that involving myself in a random gunfight isn’t going to result in me getting my brains fucked out by hundreds of super hot women. What it will result in is me getting shot by a responding police officer who saw a man with a gun and decided his safety was more important than determining whether or not I was a good guy sheepdog. Even if I don’t get shot I know that there will likely be a long legal battle ahead.

Holding the attitude that you’re a sheepdog and will therefore run towards gunfights is a quick way to end up six feet under the ground or in a cage and in debt to a lawyer.