From cnet : Information on beating cctv cameras, work spies, bugs, identity thieves and beating them at their own game.
Tinfoil hat optional...

By Rory Reid on 19 March 2008,   2:55pm

Big Brother is watching you -- and we're not talking about the   mind-numbing reality show. The UK has become a real-life Orwellian nightmare. There's reportedly a CCTV camera for every 14 people. Police helicopters circle our skies. Phones are tapped on a routine basis and your information is harvested by nefarious forces intent on stealing your identity.
Perhaps modern society isn't quite so dystopian, but we're not exaggerating by much. Thankfully there are ways to protect your anonymity. Over the next few pages we'll train you in the art of counter-intelligence. We'll show you how to use technology to protect yourself and give you the tools you need to get your privacy back. Failing that, we'll at least help you figure out if you're simply a paranoid schizophrenic.
How useful you might find these tips and gadgets depends on your   attitude to surveillance, and let's face it, your mental health. Nevertheless, there is a burgeoning anti-spy market and the products out there range from real conspiracy-theorist stuff to genuinely sensible privacy precautions. We've included a handy Paranoia Rating -- out of five tinfoil hats -- to help you judge their usefulness and practicality


BEAT THE CAMERAS

The number of security cameras in the UK is astonishing. The UK has 1 per cent of the world's population and 20 per cent of the world's CCTV cameras. Croydon, believe it or not, has more cameras than New York City -- although that's fair enough, given how rowdy Tiger Tiger can get on a Saturday night. Some believe CCTV is a great way of keeping the peace, while others, like us, think it's far too open to abuse. Exercise your right to anonymity using these techniques:

URA/FILOART I-RASC headset
Essentially an elastic headband with a circle of infra-red LEDs at the front, the I-RASC headset sounds silly, but the light it emits is blinding to CCTV cameras. Better still, it's invisible to the human eye, so nobody will notice anything suspicious. Apart from the stupid-looking headband with tiny bulbs at the front. Unfortunately you can't buy these yet, but it doesn't look that difficult to knock one up in your shed. Buy the LEDs off eBay and the headband from NikeTown, and Bob will be your very anonymous uncle.

Do it   yourself

Paranoia scale: 5 tinfoil hats out of 5

SpyFinder Hidden Camera Locator

If you don't want to hide from the cameras, you should at least know where they are. The SpyFinder helps you find hidden cameras, whether they be CCTV, camcorders or those sneaky spy/pinhole models used by the secret service and Top Gear's James May. Like the I-RASC, it uses a circle of ultra-bright LEDs, which in this case are located at the front of a viewfinder. Look through this viewfinder and hidden cameras in the field of view will brightly reflect the light from the LEDs, exposing their position. Knowing where cameras are can help you stay hidden, or at least arm you with the knowledge of when not to pick your nose.
 
Paranoia scale: 4 tinfoil hats out of 5


BEAT THE WORK SPIES

Up to 12 million people in the UK have their Web surfing and email monitored by their employers, according to the Policy Studies Institute. That means they know when you're doing 'Web-based research' on YouTube. They know when you're 'forming important business relationships' on Facebook. Hell, your IT manager is probably checking his logs right now, reading your IM conversations, looking at your browser history, and recommending your dismissal to HR. Stop him in his tracks!

Virtual keyboard

Some companies use keyloggers to record every button you press, so don't press any buttons! Fire up the On-Screen Keyboard application in Windows by going to Start, All Programs, Accessibility. From there you can use your mouse to click on letters as a means of inputting data -- and best of all, nobody can read your keystrokes. We discovered this technique back in 2004 when we began writing this article and we haven't looked back since.

Free   with Windows XP/Vista

Paranoia scale: 4 tinfoil hats out of 5

Anonymous Web surfing

Web sites such as the Cloak or beHidden can help you browse anonymously -- and those cheque-signing morons upstairs won't suspecting a thing. They work by acting as a proxy, or middle man. You tell them what sites you want to visit, they download the info, process it, encrypt it, then send it back to your PC anonymously. Titles of pages are hidden, as is all the traffic, so you're well-protected from monitoring tools. Just remember to use the virtual keyboard to input the Web address -- so as to avoid those pesky keyloggers -- and you're in business.

Free at beHidden.com

Paranoia scale: 3 tinfoil hats out of 5


BEAT THE BUGS

Most of us think bugging only happens in sci-fi movies. But most of us are poor, deluded fools. It recently emerged that in the UK, upwards of 1,000 people a day are being bugged by the government, intelligence services and local councils. Those being bugged vary from suspected Al-Qaida operatives to illegal fly tippers, and many innocent citizens are being bugged due to administrative errors. Don't be a victim -- protect yourself using these easy-to-follow techniques.

PR5000 Bug Detector

If someone's planted a listening device in your home, chances are you'll find it using one of these. This bad boy detects any VHF, UHF and microwave transmitter chattering in the 3MHz and 5GHz frequency, which is most bugs. If it detects anything suspicious, it'll beep or vibrate. You can even pinpoint the exact location of the bug thanks to the 10-LED indicator. The closer you are to the listening device, the more LEDs light up. It's that simple.
 
Paranoia scale: 4 tinfoil hats out of 5

AJ34 White Noise Generator

Not all spies use traditional bugs. Some will literally park outside your home or office and eavesdrop using giant directional microphones.
Obviously a bug detector isn't going to help you against these devices, but you can protect yourself using a white noise generator. While you're busy talking, these generate background noises that vary in frequency and amplitude, making them almost impossible to filter out. White noise works against RF transmitters, tape recorders and hard-wired microphones and will protect   a room of up to 14 sq m.

Paranoia scale: 5 tinfoil hats out of 5

Securephone Encrypted GSM phone

If you use a telephone, there's a good chance people can and will eavesdrop. A trained spy can clone your mobile phone or lock in on your conversations with relative ease, which is why you might want to use the Securephone. These are loaded with encryption software that scrambles your calls and texts using military-grade techniques. All calls are made using strict verification procedures and layered encryption, based on AES, Serpent and Twofish ciphers. At least two phones are required for encrypted voice and data communication, so you'll need to buy one for each and every trustworthy person you talk to. The hardware is an otherwise basic Qtek 8500 Musicphone, which features email, a dedicated music player, quad band, EDGE/GPRS and MSN Messenger.
 
Paranoia scale: 5 tinfoil hats out of 5

Hide and monitor your emails

Some emails should never be sent from your work address. That's why webmail was invented. Unfortunately your employers can gain access to this too, if they try hard enough. So it's always a good idea to secure your private mail by using something such as Readnotify. This clever online app lets you view when, by whom and where your email was opened -- thus enabling you to see if it was intercepted by 'The Man'. It'll also tell you how long the message was read for, how many times it has been opened, and whether it's been forwarded to another address or opened on a different computer. It'll even have your messages self-destruct after a certain amount of time -- just like in Mission: Impossible.

Free at Readnotify.com

Paranoia scale: 2 tinfoil hats out of 5


BEAT THE IDENTITY THIEVES

Identity theft costs the UK economy £1.3bn every year. In fact, someone's probably cloning your credit card right now. Oh look, that little piece of crumpled up paper you threw in the bin -- the one that looks like rubbish but is actually a bank statement -- yeah, that's on its way to your friendly neighbourhood refuse collector, who'll use it to clone your identity and buy himself a new TV. Here's how you can stop him.

Encrypt your data

Even if you believe nobody will gain access to your PC, it's always worth encrypting your files. All it takes is a little misplaced trust and an intelligence operative masquerading as your spouse/mother/offspring to blow your cover. Software encryption with applications such as AutoCrypt is a good start, but you're better off using hardware-based encryption such as DESkey. This can scramble your data and only unscrambles it when you insert the accompanying DESLock USB dongle, which you keep on your person.
 
Paranoia scale: 3 tinfoil hats out of 5

Clean up your hard drive

Many of us sell our PCs on when they become too slow to tolerate. Many of us even have the good sense to delete their private data and format the hard drive before doing so. But even this method isn't enough to stop a determined hacker from restoring and accessing your files. That's why we recommend DriveScrubber. This software wipes all your personal data by overwriting them with gibberish multiple times. It's like spilling multiple buckets of paint over a confidential sheet of A4 paper -- the resultant cornucopia of mess leaves your old files unrecognisable and unrecoverable.

Paranoia scale: 1 tinfoil hat out of 5

Stay off Facebook

It goes without saying: leaving your information on social networking sites is like airing your dirty laundry in public. Dirty laundry with pockets stuffed full of cash. Spies can steal your identity with little more than knowledge of your name and rough whereabouts. All it takes is a quick Google search, a look at the Yellow Pages and a bit of imagination. If the pull of social networking is too strong, we recommend keeping your profile hidden from search or at the very least restricted to friends -- and no, rough acquaintances you met briefly at a party don't count. Keep anyone you don't know properly restricted to a limited profile and never, under any circumstances, add any applications. Any idiot can make a Facebook app and they all get full access to all your private information.

Facebook privacy

Paranoia scale: 2 tinfoil hats out of 5


BEAT THEM AT THEIR OWN GAME

Sometimes knowing you're safe from spies isn't enough. Sometimes the only way to feel better about someone trying to invade your privacy is   to fight back, get even and engineer a situation where there's a high likelihood of kneeing the sneaking scoundrels in the goolies. Or turning them into the authorities, whichever works best for you. Here, friends, is how you can create such a scenario.

Move 8

This is a portable unit you can place inside a briefcase, car or other valuable item, and it'll alert you by text message when your property is being tampered with. You can even call it from a phone to listen in on whatever people are saying in its vicinity. Hide it in your car, in your own home, or in your boss's office to discover the truth about what's happening when you're not around. Once you know who's messing with you, you can open up a can of industrial-strength whupass.

Paranoia scale: 2 tinfoil hats out of 5

Nokia Cellular Voice Changer

Picture the scene: you know exactly who's spying on you and you want to confront them. So you call them up, use a voice-changing system to pretend you're a hot chick, then invite them to a cozy little back alley that's just big enough for three: you, the perp and a dirty great baseball bat. But violence doesn't solve anything, kids, so we're sure you can come up with all manner of uses to entrap and annoy people with this Cellular Voice Changer. Just choose whether you want to sound male or female, then place or receive a call as normal. It even functions as a standard hands-free kit.

Paranoia scale: 4 tinfoil hats out of 5

I was waiting for your input on this....
Thanks for the Tip on DBAN -I'll check it out.

Not too long ago I had to return a machine I was using at home for +- 2 years to a company I had worked for.
Needless to say by that stage the drives contained a ton of personal information.

I had my data on the one drive and OS + Programs on another, so it was really the data drive that concerned me most.
I think I used McAfee Shredder or BCWipe which effectively shreds and overwrites the data about 5 times.
I applied the same to the 'MyDocuments' and Outlook etc. folders on the OS drive.

Once done I formatted both drives  and gave them back a nice clean machine, ready to be set up for the next guy to use (They normally reformat it in any event so I did not feel bad about doing this at all, in fact I felt I was saving them some time...)

Never trust a techie with too much time on their hands...

Tinfoil hat rating 2 out of 5

Quick question : Can you use DBAN to perform this operation on selected files/folders or does it have to be an entire drive?

Unfortunately no, DBAN is a complete disk wiping solution. It comes in the form of a bootable CD.

As I've experienced, the difficulty of wiping certain selected folders from an NTFS hard disk will require reasonably good tools to do. For that reason, what I find easier to do is to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows for 100% complete peace of mind. Unfortunately no possible in your case?

There is an option though, I know WinHEX has an option to securely delete a file, that might be useful.

@Rustum

Yes, formatting the drive could leave potential data behind, in theory it shouldn't, but then again depends how you format the disk. If you formatted it in Windows Setup using the "quick" option or formatted it using a 3rd party tool there is a chance that data could remain.

At this stage, I have confidence in DBAN because I used it extensively, and I have proof it wipes every sector of the drive. Of course after you DBAN a drive, you will have to repartition it and format it all over again!

@Jason.

Well that still sounds good then if it comes in the form of a bootable CD.
That's the problem I was facing with my previous data wipe.

I could securely wipe the data off the D: drive where most of my data was stored because the operating system and programs I used to do it were still in place.
Securely cleaning the entire C: drive was an issue and I thus only scoured the obvious areas (folders) I could think of before reformatting.

This would work nicely then to securely wipe the OS drive.

Well I tried out some of the programs available for download on the net quite long ago to recover deleted / formatted data and some of them did a half decent job of recovering some data.

For instance:

"half decent job of recovering some data"

might be recovered as:

"h$lf d*&ent job_o( rec*veri@g some data"

You get the basic idea...
That's without involving any lab or specialized equipment...

OK peeps, I'm still confused. I asked a "complete reformat" to distinguish from 'quick' format.

So, even a Windows non-quick format leaves data that can be recovered?

By any old recovery tool?

Or by specialist deep-forensic tools?

Windows non-quick format does not overwrite the disk with 0's or anything like that, so yes, data could be recovered. Not by any old recovery tool, but certainly by ones that are available for download, by anyone. The main difference between full and quick format is that full scans for bad sectors, and marks them - it does not increase security as far as I'm aware.

you are truly correct.

Rustum, there have been tools on the market, that could recover one's hard drive, even after format, certainly going back to Windows 3.11 days.
No forensics tools needed.

I've tested a DBAN'ed drive with proper forensics tools and it came up unrecoverable, I could not read a bloody thing, except zeroes. This is why DBAN takes almost a full day to wipe a 250 gig hard drive, when a format takes maybe 1 1/2 - 2 hours.