How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets, and Your Life
“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
How to Be Invisible – 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!
Editorial Reviews
Review – How to Be Invisible
“Fascinating… a regular field manual… meticulously researched and very entertaining.” ―G. Gordon Liddy
“A subversive, disturbing, and altogether remarkable exposure of our frightening transparency to government agencies, investigators, the media, and more malign forces. This is a memorable work which should be considered by many.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“J.J. Luna gives the smartest, sanest, and most practical advice on just how to stay out of sight in the real world. Buy this book if you value your privacy.” ―Ned Beaumont, author of Beat the Border and The Policeman Is Your Friend and Other Lies
“Read this meticulously researched and highly entertaining book, learn its techniques…then vanish in plain sight!” ―Lt. Patrick Picciarelli, NYPD (ret.), bestselling author of Jimmy the Wags
Book Review by MAT
This book is very impractical for the vast majority of people. The main premise of the entire book is hiding your home address, which is nearly impossible for most people. While I understand and appreciate his reasons for wanting to do this if you have any hope of living a semi-ordinary life then you will find this one step impossible to implement.
The author basically says that you need to create a ghost address to solve these problems, which is also extremely difficult if not impossible and still live a normal life. He advocates you don’t have a mortgage (rent until you can pay all cash for a house), don’t have a bank account, don’t send your kids to public school and host of other sacrifices to hide your home address. These suggestions simply are not practical for most people.
I thought the book could have been vastly improved if he had started it off with a threat assessment exercise where you determine what threats you face and what privacy measures would help you mitigate those threats and then proceed to give advice to solve those specific issues. For example, perhaps hiding your home address so possible serial killers (seriously that is in the book) don’t find you is not your largest concern, but rather hackers stealing your identity is. Perhaps you are a small business owner and you want keep your assets and financial affairs more private to avoid looking like someone with “deep pockets” that is worth suing from your business activities.
I did find some of the chapters of his book to have some useful information in them to boost some of your privacy measures, but by and large those chapters are a small part of his overall plan and he even says of little to no use if you don’t manage to hide your home address. That is his key focus in the whole book.
For the average person to implement his level 2 privacy measures you would have to live off the grid, have nothing in your name, rent your place or pay all cash and hide the ownership records, have all of your utilities and bank accounts in other people’s names or only pay in cash which also creates problems and a host of other sacrifices. By the time you did all of those things you find that you *might* have privacy (remember we live in a post 9/11 big data world now) but have no life to speak of because you have given up so many other things to get it.
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About the Author
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.
Originally published: 7 July 2000
Genre: Reference work