Surveillance in Major League Baseball

Surveillance is everywhere:

Ex-MLB star Lenny Dykstra says he spent $500,000 to hire private investigators to spy on MLB umpires and used their secrets — including affairs and gay sex — as leverage to get calls during games…

“Its wasn’t a coincidence that I led the league in walks the next few years, was it?”

Those PI’s assigned the same professional private sector surveillance contractors that the FBI calls up to begin immediate surveillance on anybody who they decide to target, until the FBI/DHS teams can be shipped in, briefed, and begin their coverage. They may even back FBI/DHS teams in some operations.

This happens all over, from business, to government, to jealous neighbors and family, and it happens most often when least expected and when most unlikely. Surveillance isn’t a balls to the wall, face to face, let the best man win game. It is a sneaky deceptive game, played behind your back when you aren’t looking. It is most effective when it catches you unawares. For that reason, surveillance operations are most often launched when you would never believe surveillance would possibly have gone operative on you.

If you expect surveillance and it is almost a certainty it would be launched on you, then the cost of the operation will immediately go up exponentially and the likelihood of success will plummet. At its most extreme, it is almost silly and wasteful to launch the operation. If your target doesn’t expect surveillance because it would seem silly to do it, then the operation will almost certainly succeed, the cost and effort required will be low, and it would be stupid to not launch it. If spotted, the target won’t even believe it could be surveillance.

Launching surveillance before it is expected also has the advantage of conferring easy deniability on the operation, if one wishes to maintain deniability. If discovered, nobody will believe the target’s claim of surveillance, since it would seem so unlikely that surveillance would have been operative.

Small tactics you can employ on a regular basis to avoid being unwittingly surveilled are fast driving, frequent passing, boxing traffic up behind you on the highway before taking off fast (and leaving any follower mired in the backup, while watching to see if they try to break away and speed up to follow you), unexpected exiting, blowing red lights, driving deeper into parking lots before leaving and looking for triggers calling your exit, routing travel through lightly trafficked areas where others shouldn’t follow you to see if anyone does, looking for familiar faces in different areas and over different times, and monitoring traffic and pedestrian patterns for changes around both your house and frequent destinations.

As it stands now, most people will never come under surveillance, but once the collapse hits, if you have secured your future there will be people looking to take that from you. The most dangerous among them will use surveillance to plan their attacks. If you are fortunate enough to have something good now, from a coin collection to a gun safe filled with the best quality arms money can buy, you might end up under coverage even before that.

Stay sharp – Surveillance is everywhere.

Apocalypse cometh™