They caught a Russian spy, hidden away in a bank:

There was no mention of spies during the plea proceeding, but U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara embraced the secretive nature of the alleged scheme in a statement. “An unregistered intelligence agent, under cover of being a legitimate banker, gathers intelligence on the streets of New York City, trading coded messages with Russian spies who send the clandestinely collected information back to Moscow. This sounds like a plotline for a Cold War-era movie, but in reality, Evgeny Buryakov pled guilty today to a federal crime for his role in just such a scheme,” Bharara said.

The Rothschild family fortune began with a single pawnbroker/coin dealer who realized the power of financial information, and who began buying it to exploit it for financial gain. Before long he had developed an intricate privately owned economic espionage network that spanned across Europe. It could disseminate false information to drive a valuable asset’s price down for cheap acquisition, make a worthless asset seem valuable so it could be offloaded, or even uncover something cheap which should have been costly.

It is no coincidence that their family eventually came to dominate banking. That was where the most important intelligence coalesced. When you own the bank, you own all the intelligence on everyone’s finances. Want to know how that shop down the street undercuts its competitors? Check what suppliers they pay. Want to know which asset is thriving, and worth acquiring? It is right there in your books.

Today, banks are where many nascent intelligence operations will begin their searches for detailed financial data. Bankers themselves might as well be government spooks, given all their reporting requirements. Make a transfer over $10,000? It is reported. Make a transfer under $10,000? It may be reported too, and probably will be, if there is any possibility it was made under $10,000 to avoid the reporting requirement. Draw out a lot of cash? Put in a lot of cash? Put in small amounts of cash, but do it often? It will get reported, and trigger someone taking a closer look at you. Law enforcement, PI’s, domestic intelligence, the political powerbrokers who pull strings, foreign intelligence, and even nosy tellers can find out anything about you.

However the main reason you should be aware of this is because in the apocalypse there will be criminals who will get their girlfriends hired on as tellers and bank employees. Once hired, they will be able to peruse bank account balances, pull home addresses of the wealthy, and their gangs will then be able to begin surveillance coverage of any potentially lucrative targets to look for opportunities.

Situational awareness is great, but you should also begin understanding the flow of your information and how that may trigger interest in you. Where do you do things which might reveal how much wealth you are sitting on in the apocalypse? People will be looking for that. What records do you generate, and where will they be amassed? That is where those people will drift, to find what they are looking for. How would you find yourself, if you wanted to rob someone like you? Do you have routine large shipments from somewhere that indicate wealth? Do you belong to a club frequented by the wealthy? Where would the records of those connections be searchable? That is where your adversaries will go to find all the people just like you.

It is probably also no coincidence that today few people know all that much about the Rothschild’s family fortune or the individual member’s finances. They don’t even appear on the “richest person” lists. Intelligence is paramount in all matters of war, and that works both ways.

It sounds paranoid, yet savages routinely target and hunt for much smaller sums than you have. Remember this guy?

There are breaking new developments in the murder of a Houston man who last month was accused of a sex act on a Las Vegas Ferris wheel. This morning in probable cause court, authorities alleged Phillip Panzica was targeted after bragging about getting several thousands of dollars from “Inside Edition” for his side of his story in the alleged crime. Panzica, 27, was gunned down last Saturday morning in southwest Houston… The carjacking happened around 5:15am Saturday in the 9200 block of Richmond Avenue at Ocee Street.

Those guys didn’t just see him, and decide to attack. They asked around about him, probably followed him around for a bit, watched for a predictable pattern, and then struck when they had found one. Had he been unpredictable, then they would have had to watch longer and had more trouble staying out of sight – and he would have had a better chance of making the surveillance. Had he been more attuned to whether people were surveilling him while he was out, he might have seen what was coming and survived. But most of all, had he kept his mouth shut, he would likely still be alive today. It sounds paranoid, but this guy was killed because he said he made a few thousand dollars. Many people have gun collections worth many times more than that. The savages are out there, and if you have it and they find out about it, they will come.

Active measures, like using a PO Box to keep your street address private, or storing assets under various legal entities, rather than your own name might also be of use, but first you should understand your exposure, so you can understand the threat.

Before you even spot that first sign of criminal surveillance targeting you, somebody somewhere will be out there trolling the numbers in the places where they accumulate, looking for anything which stands out as unusual. Realizing where you are vulnerable to exposure early could allow you to massage those numbers as you go through life. If you are smart, you’ll make sure you don’t stand out so much and thus can stay off everybody’s radar.

One thing the apocalypse will tend to cull will be the modern narcissistic drive to relish attention, and actively seek it out.

In Apocalypse, it will be best if nobody knows anything about you.