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How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets, and Your Life
How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets, and Your Life
How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets, and Your Life
Ebook346 pages4 hours

How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets, and Your Life

By J. J. Luna

3/5

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About this ebook

"Fascinating... a regular field manual... meticulously researched and very entertaining." --G. Gordon Liddy

A thoroughly revised and updated edition of the essential guide to preserving your personal security

From cyberspace to crawl spaces, new innovations in information gathering have left the private life of the average person open to scrutiny, and worse, exploitation. In this thoroughly updated third edition of his immensely popular guide How to Be Invisible, J.J. Luna shows you how to protect your home address, hide your ownership of vehicles and real estate, use pagers with dumbphones, switch to low-profile banking and invisible money transfers, use alternate signatures, and how to secretly run a home-based business.

J.J. Luna is an expert and highly trained security consultant with years of experience protecting himself, his family, and his clients. Using real life stories and his own consulting experience, J.J. Luna divulges legal methods to attain the privacy you crave and deserve, whether you want to shield yourself from casual scrutiny or take your life savings with you and disappear without a trace. Whatever your needs, Luna reveals the shocking secrets that private detectives and other seekers of personal information use to uncover information and then shows how to make a serious commitment to safeguarding yourself.

There is a prevailing sense in our society that true privacy is a thing of the past. In a world where privacy concerns that only continue to grow in magnitude, How to Be Invisible, Third Edition is a critical antidote to the spread of new and more efficient ways of undermining our personal security.

Privacy is a commonly-lamented casualty of the Information Age and of the world's changing climate--but that doesn't mean you have to stand for it. This new edition of J. J. Luna's classic manual contains step-by-step advice on building and maintaining your personal security, including brand new chapters on:
- The dangers from Facebook, smartphones, and facial recognition
- How to locate a nominee (or proxy) you can trust
- The art of pretexting, aka social engineering
- Moving to Baja California Sur; San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato; Cuenca, Ecuador; or Spain's Canary Islands
- The secrets of international privacy, and much more!

LanguageEnglish
PublisherMacmillan Publishers
Release dateJul 17, 2012
ISBN9781250015150
How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets, and Your Life
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Author

J. J. Luna

In 1959, J. J. (Jack) Luna sold his outdoor advertising business in the Upper Midwest and moved with his wife and small children to Spain’s Canary Islands. Outwardly, he was a professional writer and photographer. Secretly, he worked underground in an activity that was at that time illegal under the regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Although many of his friends were jailed or deported, Luna was never apprehended.   In 1970 Franco moderated Spain's laws, leaving Luna free to come in from the cold. By that time, however, privacy and secrecy had become ingrained habits. In the years that followed he started up various low-profile one-person businesses, built them up, and then sold them. Since 1999 he’s worked—among other things—as an international consultant specializing in personal privacy and security.   Luna is the author of How to Be Invisible: The Essential Guide to Protecting Your Personal Privacy, Your Assets, and Your Life.

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Reviews for How to Be Invisible

3/5

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  • 4/5
    Valuable... this is a very niche field with very little information available for those who are interested. As the author says, the book is not a soapbox for political views, ranting, or conspiracy theories. Just practical advice on keeping private things private.

    1 person found this helpful

  • 3/5
    Wow, paranoid. With some good reason but a tough chew for some.

    I had some issues with it, aside from some poor copy-editing and substantive editing. First, and most important, I found many things that actually were illegal in this book. This could be a nationality issue - the book is written for Americans and I am not - but because I had picked a chapter in the middle to read for fun before reading the whole thing and found the things I knew to be illegal, I was now questioning the legality of everything in the book. It made the entire thing less enjoyable for me.

    The next part was the sexism. Most of the book was simply about the facts but any time there was anything that could be gendered, it reeks of '60's rhetoric - with the man arranging everything and having to protect the poor, little wife. When he suggested names for people he even stuck with only giving male suggestions. I hate to say it but women have even more cause to have to value their privacy, yet it was not a consideration.

    It needs to be updated again for modern times. For example, stopgap computers are not always possible as software no longer comes on CD/DVDs. Once one has to log on even once to obtain software, or plug in a stick to transfer files, updating security patches becomes a necessity. As well, more and more, all levels of government just expect people to have access to modern technology and do not have hard-copy alternatives. I cannot count the number of times I have gotten into some upset because a civil servant has told me that I must now go to the public library for Internet access then, if I cannot afford home Internet, because they simply do not have paper applications, not even to order. I now need a smartphone to call a cab. It's ridiculous and technology is becoming unavoidable.

    The last issue I am going to mention is the money. His solutions are costly. It is a shame because it is often the people who do not have money who need more protection. For example, it is those in helping professions (cops, social workers, free clinic workers, addiction workers, teachers, therapists, etc.) who attract unwanted attention from those they serve, but their professions do not remunerate them as well as others. The advice he gives doesn't well serve large groups who would likely need it.

    While there were some takeaways, most of the advice I will be following was also mentioned in other books on this topic. this isn't going to be the first book I recommend to people.
  • 5/5
    I was about to quit my membership at Scribd because they took over 60 of the books I read this year.

    But then I saw JJ Luna on here. Have read five or more books by this author, and get a huge kick out of them. Looks like I will stay another week to read this precious book that I have wanted for a few years! It's great so far. Hopefully Scribd won't take it away in the middle of reading like they did to the rest of my Library.

    JJ Luna is top notch.

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Book preview

How to Be Invisible - J. J. Luna

PREFACE

What’s Changed, and What Stays the Same

In 1997, the basic information you are about to read in chapters 1 through 12 sold for $297. It was called The Privacy Report and was sold by mail. When the orders came in—over 300 the first year—I printed the report myself, punched the pages, and inserted them into a three-ring binder. Although I included a two-year money-back guarantee, only 2 percent of the readers asked for a refund—the other 98 percent apparently considered the $297 to be a fair price.

In 1998, I decided to abandon all the mail-order work so my agent sold the report to St. Martin’s Press. When it was published in 2000 as How to Be Invisible, I was profiled in Playboy, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, and featured on The G. Gordon Liddy Show. The book climbed to number 37 on Amazon.com and stayed high on the list, year after year, as the best-selling book on privacy. A revised edition was published in 2004 but now, eight years later, the time has come for a completely updated international-oriented version that includes information on smartphones, facial recognition, and social networks.

1

HOW THIS BOOK CAN MAKE YOU INVISIBLE

One day you can be on the top of the world; the next day you can be in hell. One of Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur cartoon strips is titled LEGAL MUGGING. It shows a businessman on the sidewalk of a dark street with his hands in the air. A sign on a post reads:

CAUTION:

WATCH FOR TRIAL ATTORNEYS.

Stepping from a narrow alley is a lawyer wearing a stocking cap, dark glasses, and holding out a legal document.

This is a frivolous lawsuit, says the attorney to his victim. You can either spend years and thousands of dollars defending yourself, or we can settle out of court right now.

Although this was in a comic strip, what it portrays is not comical—especially when you are served without a hint of advance warning. More than 1 million lawsuits are filed each year in this country. How many of those do you think are frivolous, but are nevertheless settled out of court?

More than one reader has answered a knock on the door and went into shock at being greeted by reporters, photographers, and trucks with big satellite dishes outside of his or her home! From this day forward, when you read your newspaper or watch the news on TV, start searching for cases where an unknown person is suddenly thrust into the national spotlight, then ask yourself:

COULD THIS POSSIBLY HAPPEN TO ME?

The following are just a few of the many things that could bring the media, or worse, to your home:

• A bomb goes off, you were in the area, and the FBI thinks you fit the profile.

• An identity sketch of the person who robbed the convenience store at 11:45 p.m. last night is flashed on TV, and it looks just like you. And you don’t have a plausible excuse for that time that anyone’s going to believe.

• You were innocently involved with the wrong people and the 60 Minutes crew is within minutes of tracking you down.

• Someone faked your e-mail address when searching for sex with twelve-year-olds, and the police are at your door.

An article in Newsweek, titled Getting the Wrong Man, gives a chilling example of something that occurs more often than you might think.

Tom Kennedy found the body of his wife, Irene, who had been strangled and stabbed 29 times while on her daily stroll through a park in the Boston suburb of Walpole. Then, a few hours later, the police called at a nearby dilapidated bungalow where Eddie Burke, a 48-year-old handyman, lived with his mother … He was practically a textbook match for police profilers: a loner who knew the victim and was clearly eccentric.

What on earth does eccentric mean? My best friends—with a smile—call me eccentric. Do I therefore fit a certain profile?

Burke was visibly nervous and gave contradictory answers when questioned by investigators.

Wouldn’t you be nervous, too?

There was blood on his clothes and hands. And forensic dentists would soon match his teeth with bite marks left on Mrs. Kennedy’s breast.

Burke was arrested for murder. Within twenty-four hours, the police learned that the DNA from the saliva on Mrs. Kennedy’s chest could not have come from Burke. Did they then release him?

Incredulously, they ran more tests, which again exonerated him. In addition, blood found on Burke turned out to be feline; he had been tending to injured cats. A palm print left on Mrs. Kennedy’s thigh didn’t match Burke’s hand, while the bite-mark evidence proved inconclusive … Yet for six weeks, police kept insisting they had the right man in jail … While he was locked away, Burke’s life was put under a microscope. He was demonized in newspapers and on TV, each story accompanied by a menacing courtroom image of Burke. The sociopathic profiles were fueled by details of his home’s contents—X-rated videotapes, kitchen knives, the book Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them.