EverydaySpy Podcast - How Not to Hide in Plain Sight

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

There is incredible power in anonymity. When nobody knows who you are, what you are doing, and ignores you even being present, you have every advantage over them. You are hiding in plain sight. But sometimes, you don't want to disappear. Sometimes, you may want to be found. In this episode, Andrew explain how to ensure you are seen by the right people, and stay invisible to the wrong people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. I recently wrapped up a contract in Denver where I was teaching a bunch of engineers how to protect themselves against industrial espionage. Now, I absolutely love teaching people about espionage. I love teaching you how to use spy skills in your everyday life. I love teaching engineers and executives, how to protect themselves against corporate espionage, economic espionage, industrial espionage. everything from how to secure yourself to how to proactively, aggressively,

aggressively defend yourself. So after I had this very short but very exciting and lucrative contract in Denver, I found myself in the Denver airport waiting to come back here to Maine, where we're spending the summer. And as I'm sitting there in the terminal, a lady walks up, and she looks just like every other lady, right? Everybody blends in to a certain extent, and she sits down at a seat across from me, and I see for some strange reason that her carry-on bag, which is a nice, hard-cased rolling bag, catches my attention because it just doesn't quite look right. She's dressed in Birkenstocks and a tank top and shorts, and she looks very, very granola, right? Very hippy, the total stereotypical person that you would expect to see at the Denver airport in the terminal going to Portland, Maine, right?

That's what she looked like. But here is this completely out of place bag made with composite metal or composite plastic, completely and totally disgustingly wasteful and not at all eco-friendly. And it's shiny and it's shiny and it's like beige and princessy and kind of bedazzled. And I'm like, what is this lady doing with this bag? And then I look a little bit closer and I see hanging from the bag a little name tag. But this isn't like any other name tag you would expect to see on a typical bag. Most bag name tags are like a little slip of paper and people handwrite their name with like black ink.

Sometimes they made a leather if they're a nice bag. Sometimes they're just cheap plastic and you slide the name thing in. Hers was a dye cut, rubberized, colorful, custom made name tag with her name written on it. And the name was Hannah Kean, H-A-N-A-H-K-E, Hannah-K-A-N-E, Hannah-K-A-K-N-E. And when I put my espionage, my spy mind, which it's hard to turn off, when I put my spy mind to work, I immediately thought both aggressively and defensively. Aggressively, I thought, if I wanted to learn more about this lady, If I wanted to artificially create a conversation, elicit information, and target her in the future, I have everything I need right here in front of me.

Defensively, I looked at it and I thought, this is such an easy person to defend because the bag is all that we would need to change. If she were to just have a simple looking satchel or even something that's more eco-friendly or more in line with, the way that she's dressed, I would have never noticed her at all, let alone her bag, even if she had that same brightly colored, very artificial name tag on it, I still wouldn't have ever noticed her at all. I would have looked past the entire person, past the bag, and past the name tag. So here was the lesson that I had just finished teaching the engineers in Denver. I had just finished teaching them how to protect themselves against industrial espionage. A big piece of that is teaching people how to blend in, how to disappear in plain sight, but also how to

how to stay off the radar for people who are looking for you. Here is Hannah with her bag and her name tag. Clearly just in a position where she's, she thinks that she's safe. She thinks that nobody's really noticing her, but I noticed her because I was just tuned in to the discrepancies in her persona. So what did I do? I wanted to make sure that I could get a good view of Hannah's name tag because it was partially covered up by her jacket or her sweatshirt or whatever she was carrying with her. So I actually took my laptop and I took all of my carry-on stuff and I sat right next to her. Technically, I sat one seat away from her in the terminal because they were still blocking

off seats for coronavirus. So I sat one seat away from her, but basically right next to her, as closest to somebody as you can get these days. And I pulled out my laptop, got onto the Denver terminal Wi-Fi, and I pulled up a Google search window, and I literally typed into the Google window her name, just as it's spelled right on her name tag as I'm sitting right beside her in the Denver terminal. what pops up. So apparently Hannah Keene is not a common name. And this specific Hanakine with long red hair and standing about 5 foot 11 weighing about 160 pounds is well known in her own

circles. It turns out that Hannah is a professional soccer player, or she was recently a professional soccer player on a team based in Praga, Portch, or Braga Portugal. From there, just on the first page of Google, I was able to find her Instagram account. I was able to find her whole soccer history. I was able to find who she had played for in the past, where she went to college, what she studied in, all of the stats and metrics about her. I was able to see all of her social media profiles. And then I started to look, click through the different social media files. What does she look like on Instagram? What does she look like on YouTube? What is she posting? What kind of content. When I got there, what I saw was real posts posted in real time. So I actually was able to

start looking at exactly what Hannah had been doing in Denver the preceding day and the two days before that. I was able to backtrack and see that she had come from Portland to Denver, and here I was sitting next to her as she's ready to go from Denver back to Portland. Turns out that her career with the Braga football team in Portugal recently came to an end because of a series of small injuries. How do I know that because it was all there in her social media profile. Now, I'm not saying this because I want you to criticize Hannah, because from Hannah's perspective, she wasn't looking for anyone's attention, not at the terminal that specific day. But because of the way she chose to carry herself with a very high-end bag, which is something I would expect because she was a professional sports athlete,

so she has probably made good money in the past. So it makes sense that she would have the money to spend on nice travel equipment because she probably traveled quite a bit to go from game to game. She's been a pro football player for a while, so it makes perfect sense that she would have that kind of bag. The discrepancy, the mistake she made in securing herself was how she dressed for the day of travel and the bag that she chose to travel with. Had she been dressed in all nice soccer gear with like a sweatsuit or a track suit showing off where she came from being the brand representative of her team, that would have made sense. Seeing somebody with a nice bag and a nice soccer suit, whatever. I wouldn't have researched her as an individual.

I would have been researching the team that she was representing. But instead, because of this personal discrepancy and because of my more, my heightened sense of security that specific day, because I had just spent the morning teaching people how to protect themselves from this exact kind of scenario where somebody sees you, pulls up your social media profile, pulls up your background, and can learn this much information about you in just a few minutes while sitting right beside you. So it took some self-discipline. And if you've ever met me, I'm sure you can imagine what this is like. It took quite a bit of self-discipline for me not to engage in a bump right there on the spot. Now, a bump is a human intelligence term where you artificially create first contact with a specific target.

Everything in me wanted to just reach out, tap her on the shoulder, and start a conversation. And through that conversation, confirm all of the information that I had already collected about her through open source research. and then kind of build a relationship where she would want to continue talking to me. That is a spy's weakness. We want to constantly create artificial conversations, artificial relationships that make the other person want to keep coming back to us because doing that, you build a reserve of resources. Okay. Now, why am I telling you this story?

Am I telling you the story? Because I don't want you to put your name tag on your luggage. Am I telling you this story because I want you to go out there and hide in plain sight? No, I'm telling you this because Hannah had an objective when I started digging through her social media file that makes me comfortable talking about her so openly like this. Hannah is not someone who wants to hide. She is someone who wants to be found. She has multiple social media profiles. One is about her as a vegan.

One is about her as a professional soccer player. One is about her just as an artist. And she is a, she's very passionate about her art. She's very passionate about her veganism. She's obviously very passionate about her sport. So when you go and you look her up on social media, she starts to connect the dots for you. Her Instagram account will send you to her other Instagram accounts,

wherever you land. And you'll see thousands of followers on each Instagram account. She links her own social media feeds to her YouTube channel where you can see the highlights of her performance. She points you to the specific person who is her pro sports manager. So you can see Hannah is someone who wants to be found. So the fact that I found her isn't something that's going to freak her out. Hannah, if you're listening, if any of your friends are listening, I'm sure that you would say that this is true.

You didn't expect to be on a podcast about everyday espionage, but here you are. And now that you're here, you really don't mind that a few thousand listeners are going to hear your name just in the next 24 hours. But Hannah wanted to be found a certain way. She did not want to be found that day in Portland Airport, and she most certainly didn't want. want some stranger sitting next to her, Googling her, and then starting an artificial fake conversation just to confirm that the meta and bio data I found online was true.

That would be borderline and abuse of privacy. So I didn't want to do that to her then and there, right? But I'm telling you this because if you are the kind of person who's in business, if you're the kind of person in entertainment, if you're the kind of person trying to build a legacy of creating of creating as an artist or as a filmmaker, as someone who does podcasting or someone who does audio work,

or if you're in the business of trying to sell a product or trying to build a brand, you are someone who wants to be found. If you are an everyday employee or even a covert intelligence officer, you are somebody who does not want to be found. So you have many things that you can learn from this experience with Hannah. You can either choose to take your name tag off your luggage. You can make sure that your luggage matches the same kind of profile as the clothes that you choose to wear. So if you're dressing down, you should carry a bag that looks like it's dressed down.

If you carry a really expensive bag and you dress down, you're going to get people's attention. And the kind of attention you're going to get is probably from the wrong kind of people. Thankfully, I'm just a former spy looking for interesting content in life. But if I would have been a criminal or if I would have been somebody who was intentionally looking for a target, Hannah's profile that day would have caught my attention. Why is she walking around with a $300 bag, but she looks like she's wearing $25 worth in secondhand clothes? That doesn't make sense. It makes me want to steal that bag.

You can protect yourself from all that attention just by having consistency in the profile that you use. When you go through an airport, go through a bus terminal, when you're standing at a taxi, or when you're walking downtown through a city. If you are the kind of person who does want to be found, then you want to make sure that the right people find you. So Hannah wasn't looking to be found that day. But if she did want to be found, she could have rolled up in all of her full Braga Portugal team regalia. That would have made her easy to find. She could have worn clothes that matched the profile that was set by her rolling bag. She could have been wearing nice shirts and nice slacks and had her hair done and had her makeup on like she does in all of her Instagram videos,

but she wasn't doing any of that that day. She looked as plain and granola and real as she could possibly look that day. When I saw her on Instagram and I turned my head to the right and saw her in real life, she did not look like the same person outside of the fact that she had red hair that was about three and a half feet long. She was very clearly the same person in terms of the shape of her nose, her forehead, her long hair, her body type. But she looked completely different without any of the makeup or the fancy filtering that you get online. So if you want to be found as a business owner, as a personality, as a celebrity, as an aspiring talent, if you want to be found, you have to make sure that you act consistently online and offline and you put forward

all the right flags, all the right identifiers to make sure that people will find you. What does that look like? That looks like if you have a hashtag, go ahead and have a die cut sticker made of your hashtag and stick that right onto your roller bag. Just like Hannah had that really nice custom-made name tag. If you want to be found, put a really nice custom-made name tag on your luggage. Put it on your backpack. Put it on like a windbreaker or a blazer or something that you wear when you're traveling just to stay warm or stay dry.

People will see you. People will notice it. People will look up what they find when they look for your hashtag, when they look for whatever unique identifier you have on your bag. on your person. Now, when I travel, I don't want to be found. I don't want to be Andrew Bustamante, founder of everyday spy, ex-CIA officer all the time. I want to be that when I talk to you, but I don't want to be that when I'm walking downtown here in Bangor, Maine, or Belfast, Maine, or Portland, Maine. I don't want to be that when I'm going to a private contract in Denver. I don't

want to be that when I'm on an airline traveling between two countries. I just want to be a dude that you don't even realize was sitting next to you searching your name on his laptop three feet away. I don't want to be someone you notice. And Hannah didn't notice me that day. Nobody notices me when they see me day to day. And that's exactly how I like it because that gives me the power of anonymity and the power of espionage. I can look for the people I want to look for.

Get the data I want to get. Use it the way I want to use it to build what I'm trying. to build. That's exactly what we are doing here today. I had the experience. I searched for Hannah. I did the research next to her. I built the story. I built this podcast episode. I'm sharing it with you. That's how you use the power of espionage to get yourself closer to your end goal. But the way that you protect yourself from the dangers of espionage is to make sure that you're only letting people find you the way you want them to find you. And when you don't want to be found, you can truly disappear in plain sight.

That is Everyday Espionage. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at Everyday Spy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations and join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.