Emergency Preparedness

No weekly assignment this week, just keep on keeping on until next week.

A comment came in over the weekend from one of my regular readers and I thought I’d share it with you, as well as respond to it here.

Bill writes: Jim, Survival Gear.com Steve all you guys I have nothing against your website or your blog but Steve if the SHTF all of us that are prepping and have our faces on the Internet all of us that are giving out our info about what we are doing were going to die. Were going to be the first to go out because of One reason because we were stupid enough to put and tell people that we know how to survive. The government is going to hunt us down and kill us because we were stupid enough to put our survival plans and other material on the Internet…. I don’t mean to offend anyone but its the sad truth. Yes i probably have offended many people yet its whats going to happen…

First of all, I obviously can’t speak for everyone but as for myself, I take no offense at your comment. I’m sure you’re not the only one with this concern and I’m glad you brought it up. Here’s my take on it.

If a disaster were large enough to the point where the government felt it necessary to go around confiscating supplies (food, water, etc.) from citizens, odds are good that the disaster is large enough to occupy the government’s efforts such that they’d be unable to carry out such an operation. Look at what happened during and after Hurricane Katrina. This was the largest scale natural disaster to hit America in recent memory, right? While there was a documented effort to confiscate firearms from citizens (which was widely condemned and likely won’t happen again), I don’t recall a single news story about FEMA or any other agency going door to door and taking food from folks.

And there certainly weren’t any reports, even among the fringe news groups, of government agents killing citizens for their supplies.

I’d be much, MUCH more concerned about family and friends showing up, hoping for handouts, than I would be about nefarious government agents knocking on my door, demanding all the MREs I might have stockpiled.

For me at least, this issue really isn’t anything I lose sleep over. I’d much rather do everything I can to help folks get prepared for whatever comes their way than hunker down and pray guys in tactical vests never knock on my door.

I’ve already talked a bit about protecting yourself from online scams and viruses. Today, I thought I’d concentrate on protecting your privacy. With social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter becoming so pervasive, we are “exposed” more and more.

However, before we jump in on a few tips to protect your privacy, I’d like for you to keep something in mind. If someone wants to find you, or find something out about you, nothing is impossible given enough time and budget. The idea here is to make it difficult enough to ward off the more casual searchers.

Ok, now that we have that out of the way, on with the tips.

1) The first rule to remember is, anything that gets posted to the Internet is conceivably there forever. Sure, you can delete that photo you posted of you pretending to be really friendly with that goat at the petting zoo. But, deleting it from your Facebook page doesn’t mean it is gone forever. It is still located on a computer server somewhere and could someday resurface. So, before posting potentially embarrassing pictures or messages, think twice about whether it come back to bite you in the future.

2) Check your privacy settings on sites like Facebook. Lock your profile down tight, limiting access only to friends and family. I have two separate Facebook pages. One for just family and friends and the other is more of a fan page for my writing and business stuff. This way, I can keep my personal life separate from my professional one. There is very little overlap between the two. A somewhat frightening video that shows the risks of personal information to be found on Facebook can be found here. Of course, you need to have a Facebook account to have the video work properly.

3) Be vague with profile information. Putting in your phone number and/or street address is a pretty obvious no-no. While I certainly wouldn’t be too difficult for people to find, there’s no sense in making their job any easier.

4) Set up a dummy email account. Many years ago, when I first started getting online, I opened a Yahoo account, the only purpose of which was to use it when filling out forms online. As might be expected, it gets flooded with spam on a daily basis. Once a week or so, my wife goes in and deletes everything we don’t really need. By having this account set up and using it like this, we’ve managed to keep spam out of our “real” email accounts for the most part. Plus, there is little to nothing personal that is attached to that account.

5) If you are truly worried about somehow being tracked online, you can use any of a number of free “anonymizers.” Basically, the way these work is you go to their site and jump from there to the site you wish to visit anonymously. In theory, if the owner of the site tracks your visit, it will only trace back to the anonymizer. However, bear in mind what I said before — if someone truly wants to track you down, nothing is impossible.

Most survival kit lists include snare wire. The idea behind this is one could fashion several small snares so as to catch meat for dinner. Not an inherently bad plan, but if you don’t know what you’re doing when you are making these traps, it could well all be for naught. Many traps and snares are difficult, if not downright impossible, to make just from a diagram in a book. If you don’t have the loop at just the right size, the animal’s head may not fit through cleanly, spooking the critter and leaving you still hungry.

Rat traps, on the other hand, will accomplish the same goal and require very little knowledge to implement. They look and operate just like the little mousetraps most of us have used but are larger and more powerful.

What you’ll want to do is place the baited traps along a small game trail, if you can find one. If you can’t locate a recently used trail, set them up adjacent to streams, rivers, or even lakes. Set them out at dusk and check them at first light.

What you might consider doing is drilling a small hole in one corner of the wood base, on the opposite side from where you’ll place the bait. Then, before setting the trap, run paracord or maybe even some of that nifty snare wire from the trap to a small tree or log. Occasionally, the trap won’t end up in a clean kill and the animal might try to get away. The cord prevents this from happening.

Don’t get me wrong, snare wire always has a place in survival kits. It weighs next to nothing and has a ton of uses. But, for my money, I think you’ll stand a better chance of putting meat in the pot using rat traps than makeshift snares.

I’m a big fan of the show The Walking Dead on AMC. It just started the second season last Sunday. My wife and I missed most of the first season’s episodes when they first aired and instead got caught up with them through our cable service’s On Demand feature.

Now, truth be told, I’m sick to death of zombies. For the last several years, that seems to be the predominant theme in end of the world fiction. But, The Walking Dead has just such great, compelling storytelling that I found myself riveted by it. I’ve not read the comic book series the show is based on but I’ve been told it is just as good, if not better.

One of the elements I truly enjoy is how the characters are true to life. Of course, we’re not really worried about a zombie apocalypse but if you instead substitute some type of nationwide pandemic, you’ll see what I mean. You have folks from all walks of life thrown together in this disaster, most trying to work together to survive. You also have the degenerates looking to take advantage of a world without rule of law. The ways in which these characters interact with each other just comes across as very realistic to me.

Naturally, the show gets discussed quite a bit on the various online survival forums. Many folks there are critical of the actions of the characters in various situations, particularly with how they utilize firearms and other weapons. To me, the “mistakes” the characters make just serve to make the show that much more realistic. People make mistakes in real life and frequently those mistakes have consequences.

My only real gripe about the start of the second season is it appears they are going for more gore and shock value than they did in the first season. While I’m a fan of some “blood n guts” horror, I think it detracts from the story here. One of the things that made the first season so great was they didn’t have to show the nasty stuff to get the point across and instead let the viewers just use their imagination.

Even if you’re not a fan of zombies, or horror in general, I’d encourage you to tune in to The Walking Dead and give it a shot. You might surprise yourself.

Let’s play around with a new idea here on the blog. Every Wednesday, I’d like to hear from you. With regards to your preps, how are you doing? What projects are you working on? Reading any good survival related fiction or non-fiction?

In other words, what’s up?