Privacy: Dead Drops Now and Then

What is a dead drop? It is a method that spies use or have used to communicate with
Others who have information for them. The dead drop allows them to exchange information without having actual physical contact with each other. The person leaving the information can leave it under a rock or a can or bush. The person leaving the information also leaves some kind of signal the drop was made. Someone views the signal and retrieves information.Signaling devices can include a chalk mark on a wall, a piece of chewing-gum on a lamppost, or a newspaper left on a park bench. Alternatively, the signal can be made from inside the agent's own home, by, for example, hanging a distinctively-colored towel from a balcony, or placing a potted plant on a window sill where it is visible to anyone on the street. Convicted CIA mole and Soviet spy Aldrich Ames left chalk marks on a mail box in Washington D.C. to signal his Soviet handlers that he had made a dead drop. If you are an “X-Files” fan you remember the signal Mulder would put on his window. He used masking tape and taped an “X” on the window to signal “Deep throat” he needed to see him.

Some more unusual dead drops have used dead animals like rabbits, rats and a large
Bird to hide the information. These have been used by both the CIA and KGB. The one problem with this type of dead drop is that other scavengers tend to mess with dead animals. The CIA and KGB found an easy solution to that; they poured liberal doses of hot sauce on the dead animals and scavenges became disinterested in them. Another type of unusual dead drop location is using a portable toilet. The commodes could hold a lot of information; however, portable toilets are regularly vacuumed out so one would need to be careful about leaving information there. On one occasion a Porta- Potty was used, the information bag got stuck in a vacuum hose.
This is a very low-tech, simple way to communicate when you don’t want to meet face-to-face with someone, or want to leave information for someone.

The tech equivalent of a physical dead drop would be the website Dead drop me dot com. (https://dead drop.me/)
As you go to the dead-drop.me site it asks you to enter the message you want to send.
It then gives you an address location where your message is and a password to get this message.

Here's why your message is safe:
Your message is not transmitted unencrypted
Your message is not stored unencrypted
Your encrypted message is stored for 24 hours, then deleted
Once your message is retrieved, it is deleted
If there is a problem retrieving your message, including an incorrect password, it is deleted
The website cannot decrypt your message, they simply don't have the password
The security of the encryption used is handled by the Symmetric Encryption engine developed at Stanford University.
The largest threat associated with this method is having your message & password both intercepted and retrieved before your intended recipient has an opportunity to retrieve it. You should be mindful of how you transmit these pieces of information, and ideally send the password separate from the link.

To further secure your message you can write it in code. My family has used a Book cipher code for years.
A book cipher is a cipher in which the key is some aspect of a book or other piece of text. Books, being common and widely available in modern times, are more convenient for this use than objects made specifically for cryptographic purposes. It is typically essential that both correspondents not only have the same book, but the same edition.
Traditionally book ciphers work by replacing words in the plain text of a message with the location of words from the book being used. In this mode, book ciphers are more properly called codes.

Another approach is to use a dictionary as the codebook. This guarantees that nearly all words will be found, and also makes it much easier to find a word when encoding
Make sure everyone in the message stream has the same printing of the book used. I bought about 10 dictionaries at the dollar store for my family.

Dead drops have been used a very long time. We know they were used during the Revolutionary War. In modern time an FBI agent named Robert Hanson, caught in 2001 spying for Russia. He used a dead drop under a bridge in Virginia.

Semper Paratus
Check 6
Burn