we all know the story in the dead of night a man sits hunched over a small radio in the corner of a cramped East Berlin apartment cigarette smoke swirling overhead as he frantically writes down seemingly random characters on a small notepad pulling in the invisibly thin antenna wire back inside his apartment Window he opens his code book and one time pad deciphering the message quickly his case officer needs to meet urgently he grabs his coat on the way out the door not knowing that his so-called invisible antenna wire wasn't really invisible he doesn't know that a concerned neighbor made a quick phone call in the meeting he was heading out for would be his last the Cold War era is filled with International Intrigue and political day taunt spies stealing out in the dead of night to fight a global war a war with no battles only casualties if World War II was the Golden Age of spies then the Cold War era was the Industrial Revolution of Espionage Spas used the most cutting-edge technology of the day tiny cameras microphones in everything tracking tags on diplomats cars and most importantly radios for the Spy abroad governments have spent billions of dollars to build massive infrastructure to communicate with even just a handful of clandestine agents overseas infrastructure which is still used today the 1980s gave us the rise of ultra portable shortwave radio receivers which could be used by spies to listen in to number stations back home they would rely on predetermined schedules tuning in at the right time each day receiving their Espionage instructions from higher command at one time shortwave receivers were super popular with most people around the world owning a small shortwave radio this was perfect for spies since owning a civilian grade shorewave radio wouldn't be viewed as suspicious if captured by authorities shortwave radio is a dual use technology at face value it has a perfectly innocent use listening to news or music from around the world however it also has another use tuning in to number stations to receive coded messages even to this day regimes Trapped In Time know the power of shortwave radio in North Korea for instance possessing a shortwave radio carries a death sentence in the years since the Cold War the technology of Espionage has gotten a lot better and become a lot more modern one-time pad messages can be sent in an email or over text message or as is extremely common these days via Bluetooth or NFC however with most counterintelligence or spy hunting operations focusing on spying on smartphones or emails or other internet-based means of communication old school shortwave radio is still very much an option for spies to send and receive messages around the world however shortwave radio is not without its own downsides and one of the biggest problems with shortwave or HF radio is that we are limited by physics and this affects arguably the biggest problem with HF radio the size shape and space needed for the antenna antenna so let's go over some options for clandestine HF antenna emplacement which kinds of antennas work best for small cramped areas but can also be set up as clindestinely as possible with one extra caveat portability if we are looking to send and receive messages by radio in cramped locations that we have to constantly move between this makes everything infinitely more difficult so why is portability such an important factor when everything else is already pretty challenging history provides the answer if you are an agent stationed in a foreign land either in the west or behind the Iron Curtain it would be a really bad idea to transmit from your home even if you are sending and receiving Communications that are encrypted Direction finding stations can narrow down your location pretty accurately though on shortwave frequencies Direction finding is a lot more difficult than you might think especially in a cramped Urban environment counterintelligence agencies on both sides of the war spent decades hunting clendestine radio stations in their own cities some were found and spy Rings were rounded up others were never found despite the best efforts to Direction find them in our modern world Direction finding is just as much of a problem as it was in the past but the incentive for massive nation-states to devote billions of dollars to rooting out spy radio stations it's just not there like it was in the past from the end of World War II to the height of the Cold War the stakes were much higher this is best demonstrated by diving into the history of how all of this got started during World War II Allied Powers learned the hard way just how difficult it was to set up resistance groups in occupied territory the Romantic idea of the French Resistance is certainly still fresh in our mind but in reality creating an effective resistance organization was very very difficult and the French Resistance in particular was not nearly as effective as one as led to believe after the war both eastern and western Nations tried to solve this problem no more air dropping and operative in Behind Enemy Lines with a radio to coordinate resistance no more insertion by submarine into a strange and foreign land these super spy activities would still be done but only sparingly as a last resort and certainly not without prior coordination with ground forces many OSS and soe agents lost their lives trying to parachute into enemy terrain with a radio throughout japanese-held Burma sometimes the last person to see an entire OSS team was the jump Master watching an entire unit's parachute canopies descend into the unfriendly jungle below never to be seen again clearly something had to be done learning from their disastrous origins in Burma the American office of strategic Services would establish resistance leadership before a conflict ever began the British Special Operations executive who also had their own troubles in northern France added their lessons to the mix and the concept of stay behind operations was born the goal of stay behind operations was to create a network of local operatives who could remain hidden and then activate when needed creating a more coordinated and sustainable form of resistance this new approach aimed to avoid the dangerous high-risk missions of the past and instead prioritize the establishment of long-term effective resistance networks to do this military units would secretly be stationed among the civilian populace and maintain intense networks of weapons caches secret radio transmitters observation and listening posts and so on these military units would work hand in hand with vast civilian resistance groups to build the infrastructure and most importantly the communications plans prior to the next War breaking out these military units and their civilian counterparts would lie in wait for an enemy at the time the Soviet Union to start rolling their tanks across the German Countryside once again stay behind units would not fight these initial Invasion waves but instead hide and wait until the front lines passed them then these stay behind and forces would be Behind Enemy Lines and able to carry out guerrilla warfare in the enemy's rear areas these crack Commando teams were called operational Detachment alpha or Oda teams fun fact this is where we get the a team from quietly stationed around West Germany these units Were Meant to serve as both intelligence collection assets and educational resources training local resistance fighters to carry out operations Behind Enemy Lines just in case west of Germany became east of Germany and since they were already in place before the war they were already there and already had vast networks of Supply caches radio transmitters and everything else needed to wage a clandestine War a few years after their creation someone in the Pentagon realized that special forces dudes trained to operate Behind Enemy Lines and train local guerrillas well these guys might be really handy to help out with a problem that was developing in French Indochina what we now know as Vietnam setting up operations in Vietnam and Southeast Asia in general some Oda commanders started wearing unique headgear during training operations and other unit functions this was the Green Beret though the history of the origins of army Special Forces is a fascinating one one of the biggest considerations for the original a teams in place throughout Europe was Communications of all of the Spy tradecraft that has been taught over the years the ability to operate a radio usually has been a baseline task if a potential agent could not operate a radio or they had no familiarity with the concepts of radio communications there was very little point in continuing with further training like sabotage operations remember in the real world sabotage operations Behind Enemy Lines were not as important during the Cold War taking a peek behind the Iron Curtain Oda teams prepared for a hot war that never came running Communications exchanging information and Manning electronic listening posts was the primary and sometimes exclusive mission of America's Special Forces today the idea of stay behind forces officially ended as most nation states shut down their programs following the collapse of the Soviet Union however with a major war currently underway in Europe it does not take much to imagine that both eastern and western powers are quietly re-examining the idea of stay behind operations and are almost certainly already miles ahead of where the Cold War left off you might ask how does this apply to us all of this spy stuff is is cool and all but we're not really concerned with International Espionage all we want to do is talk with a friend about our opinions or a medical procedure or politics or pretty much any purely innocent idea that is now treated as extremism by certain governments around the world learning from history we can easily draw a few conclusions that apply to the prepared citizen today for one Communications must be in place and functional before a conflict Begins by extension this also also means that other operational needs must be taken care of before the conflict as well but at minimum Communications are the most important part we can use coms to coordinate everything else that's why the comms network is a top priority secondly on the operational side of things clandestine tradecraft is a top priority as well remember stay behind operations and all this cool spy stuff are the actions of a nation-state if we a concerned and prepared citizenry want to apply some of these lessons today we must realize that we don't have a nation state backing us up we have to do all of this ourselves with our own funding and as such we have to be more careful in today's world a suspicious wire in the wrong spot is a huge indicator of wrong think and can easily get you in some trouble okay maybe not today specifically but we can see the writing on the wall for the future as the hobby of ham radio becomes more popular and certain agencies and governments begin to realize the power of radio and this hobby will be a prime target for suppressing Free Speech we don't have to look any further than the recent Cuban jamming incident to realize that governments have already figured this out so before that happens and before that becomes too much of a concern preparation and muscle memory is good to develop now while things are still comparatively easy and we can discuss these ideas in the open thus having a compact clandestine antenna is important but portability and Mobility are critical too in the event you are being hunted and you have to constantly move around it is these challenges that we hope to answer today but we first must determine what our needs are we don't want to get distracted by cool spy stuff and get a little bit carried away with pretending to be James Bond we want to learn from history and Implement what works best in the event that even basic communication between citizens is locked down or otherwise not available if the average citizen one day has to live their life like a spy from the 80s just to get by we want to make that as easy as possible depending on what your needs are there are two major paths you can take if you only need to receive transmissions and you are not looking to transmit at all that's one path if you want to transmit and receive messages that's another path for most of you watching this you probably want to go down the swl or shortwave listening path this is its own hobby with many people around the world getting into the addicting world of Simply listening to the signals that are out there getting a small shortwave receiver or a cheap SDR is a great way to get started with listening and it's great for learning for me personally if I had to learn the radio world all over again I would strongly recommend starting with an SDR don't worry about buying a cheap analog handheld radio at first you can do that later but learn how radio propagation works first with an SDR sdrs weren't really a thing when I first got started but they are now an industry standard so getting started with listening is a great way to start and just to to cut right to the chase if all you want to do is listen on shortwave bands the antenna that comes built into your radio will work just fine in most cases you don't really need to do anything special but if you wish you can plug in an external real antenna which is just a random piece of wire that you either plug into the radio if it has a jack for it or you can clip it to the extendable aerial you would be surprised at how effective A simple piece of wire is for increasing the number of signals you can get so if you just want to Echo James Bond and only receive signals this is as far as you need to go things get a bit more complicated if you're looking at receiving data modes which is my own interest but for the most part this is a good start and that's perfectly fine because it sets you up for the other vastly more complicated path you can take transmitting this of course requires a significant investment not only the license required to get into the ham world but also the fact that everything in the HF radio world is very expensive the ham world is unfortunate for the most part still stuck trying to sell 1930s technology at very premium prices but the good news is that if you invest in the receive only route at first you usually don't end up wasting money since having an SDR or a compact shortwave receiver is always handy to have the bottom line is that with either path you have some serious choices to make regarding antennas specifically generally speaking the antenna options for receiving messages are a lot easier than for transmitting HF signals however there are trade-offs at every turn no matter what radio you use a shortwave receiver or a several thousand dollar HF rig the biggest problem you are going to have is the antenna and depending on what you want to do you can open the whole can of worms that is the biggest fist fight of the ham radio world resonant antennas versus tuned antennas here's what I mean let's take a look at a standard dipole antenna for the 40 meter band dive polls are a fairly standard antenna style they're some of the oldest antenna Styles it really throughout history they're extremely easy to make they're extremely common and they work very very well this antenna as shown here is set up in an invis configuration or near vertical incident Skyway for closer range Communications this works pretty good if you can transmit during the time of day where invis propagation is actually you know functional but dipole antennas are resonant antennas meaning that the majority of the signal that is pushed into them resonates at the proper wavelength for the frequency you are on and the transmission gets made efficiently this is a gross oversimplification but it'll get us started depending on your choice of frequency or band the antenna has to be the exact right size the right length if we change bands we need a whole new antenna at least with dipoles so why go with a resonant antenna why would we want to use an antenna that's 68 feet long if we can get away with something smaller in a word efficiency to explain this let's look at something that is a very important concept to understand standing wave ratio or SWR if you hop on the YouTube you will hear hams talk about SWR all the time mostly in the context of showing how efficient or good an antenna is sometimes SWR gets a bit overhyped but it's still a very important thing to understand at its simplest SWR is simply a measurement of how much of a Signal's power is actually getting pushed into the antenna and thus the airwaves versus how much of that power is being reflected back down the antenna back into the coax and back into the radio if we look at this handy chart here courtesy of the fire stick antenna company we can see that this measurement is of course displayed as a ratio so for instance an SWR of 2.4 to 1 means that there will be a loss of 17 17 of the power that you're pushing into that antenna is going nowhere it's getting reflected back into the radio and if your radio is transmitting at 4 Watts that means in reality only 3.32 watts of power is actually making it out of the antenna and into the world in a world of perfect physics we would always have an SWR of one to one meaning that your radio pushes one watt into the antenna and one watt will be pushed out of the antenna perfectly well we don't live in a perfect world because the only antenna capable of an SWR of one to one is an antenna made of air specifically air in a vacuum I guess so we can see that's not possible we have to make our antennas from wire so there's always going to be some kind of loss most ham radio operators will strive for as low of an SWR as possible usually any SWR under two to one or sometimes three to one is what we're going for a crazy high SWR like a measurement of 10 to 1 means that your antenna is not resonant you can push all the power you want into it but really your antenna is just acting as a heat sink a cloud warmer and the signal itself is being converted into heat instead of transmitting out through the air now SWR readings can become a bit misleading for instance on this chart here technically an SWR of 10 to 1 means that there's a loss of 66.9 percent now you might say all right that's that's a lot but we're still getting something out right after all 33.1 percent is being transmitted and if we're using 4 Watts that means we're still getting 1.32 watts of output and in the shortwave radio world even a single watt has a lot of power for certain modes so what's the problem well remember this is all theoretical in the real world things are a bit different if you have an SWR of 10 to 1 you are going to transmit to exactly no one that signal probably won't even go as far as the other side of your house technically it should but in the real world if you have an SWR of over four or five some people say over three you are not going to be transmitting very far at all and worst of all if you transmit with a hide SWR you could possibly break your radio remember SWR is the ratio of how much power is getting out versus how much power is being reflected back to the radio this means that transmitting with a high SWR is going to push all that power back into your own radio which can physically damage your radio this is why we tried to get an SWR as low as possible I personally would never key up the mic on a 10 to 1 SWR because I would be concerned that my radio would be damaged coming back to our antenna a simple 40 meter dipole if we were to hook up an antenna analyzer to the antenna this is what we might see a chart detailing the SWR of the antenna as we can see this antenna has a great SWR on 40 meters as most of dipoles do and SWR really really close to one right here at 7.1 megahertz or right in The Sweet Spot of the 40 meter band now on either side of the lowest point we can see that the SWR starts to increase as we move up or down in frequency and then as we start to move out of the 40 meter band our SWR gets crazy high because this antenna is not resonant on any other band just 40 meters but since this u-shape here is so wide and deep we can cover pretty much the whole 40 meter band without having an SWR over say 1.5 or so at the extreme ends of the band we might start to creep up and reduce our efficiency but for the most part this whole band is good to go this is why dipoles are very much used in the qrp world if you have a small qrp radio like the ic705 or the elecraft kx2 or 3 or even a mountaintopper or something the general attitude throughout the ham Community is that resonant antennas are preferred for low power work because we want to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of the radio as possible and since resonant antennas are are usually quite long this is why we usually say the smaller the radio the bigger the antenna has to be but there are of course exceptions and one of those exceptions is using a different type of antenna are there other options that allow us to use a resonant antenna keeping the benefits of high efficiency but also being able to switch bands around so we don't have to carry around half a dozen different antennas the answer to that is yes we have a couple of other options a great alternative to a dipole is the in-fed half-wave antenna this style of antenna has become super popular throughout the ham community over the past you know few years or so as more and more people want to explore other bands than just the the common ones the extreme popularity of in-fed half-wave antennas has earned them a bit of resentment from the old school hams who sometimes see the promotion of in-fed half waves as over the top and here's why let's bring in the SWR chart for the lightweight end fed sloper or leff's antenna from chameleon don't let the name convey use you at its core this is an in-fed halfway of antenna I'm using this chart because this is the in-fed half wave that I personally use most of the time if I have the space for it now unlike the 40 meter dipole we've got a lot going on here with this antenna as we can see this antenna is resonant on several bands all at once which is awesome we can see that the SWR stays pretty low as well maybe not as great as a near perfect dipole but certainly respectable and for most people in most circumstances for routine daily Communications like spy stuff the difference between an SWR of 1.5 and an SWR of 1.8 is going to be negligible so this antenna seems like a perfect solution or as close to it as possible but remember everything in the world of radios is a trade-off and we can see this when we look at the chart unlike the dipole which had a deep and wide u-shape this antenna's curved on the parts where it's resonant are a lot sharper a lot more v-shaped than u-shaped this means that this antenna for some bands has what we call a high quality factor in the ham world you will often hear this called a high Q High Q antennas have a very narrow bandwidth that they are resident on low Q antennas like a dipole have a decently wide bandwidth that they are resonant on technically the Q factor is really just an expression of how quickly or slowly a resonator dampens out but that's a bit too much for us to get into for now just think of high Q antennas as having super narrow bandwidth sometimes so narrow that the bandwidth for the antenna is only one or two megahertz wide sometimes even lower than that in that case where you have a super high Q factor forget moving up and down the band with a high Q antenna you will have to retune the antenna every time you change frequencies pretty much now this isn't necessarily a bad thing for one this specific antenna is not at all a high Q antenna it works great for pretty much all of the ham bands or at least the most popular ones but by having a higher Q than a dipole and a narrower bandwidth that the antenna is resonant on it means that in the real world when you're going to emplace this antenna when you're going to string it up in a tree it's going to be less forgiving than say a dipole might be now don't get me wrong I have tried all kinds of utterly garbage emplacements with this specific antenna and it works just fine so so don't think that you can't get it to work I have strung this antenna up horribly and had an SWR of over three to one and still made contacts with the ic705 around the United States so for this specific antenna the Q factor is perfectly acceptable and not even worth worrying about where Q starts to matter a lot is when we talk about the Ultimate Spy antennas these right here these vary widely in naming conventions because this style of antenna usually is marketed or rebranded so many times that the original name is completely lost right but this very compact fact HF antenna is what I'm talking about because it seems like the perfect compact HF antenna solution until you actually use one and figure out what you have to do to make it work but we'll get back to these in a moment for now multi-band resonant antennas seem like a great option don't they maybe not as efficient as a dipole but in practicality you can get a respectable SWR of you know round two or maybe as high as three while still being portable and allow you to use multiple bands that's the reason for the hype with these in-fed half-wave antennas they are a good balance of all factors and a happy medium for most people but for the Spy trying to contact other Agents from a cramped apartment or for the citizen trying to communicate with friends around the country regarding forbidden topics to get censored by social media or government agencies the dipole and the in-fed half wave antenna might not be a good option the chameleon lefts for instance is a little over 60 feet long and if you use it in its preferred configuration a sloper Arrangement used still need about 40 to 50 feet of linear ground space when I lived in a place that had a postage stamp backyard these kinds of antennas were not an option simply because I did not have enough space to string them up properly I could never get an SWR down to even just a safe level much less an ideal level when trying to use one of these in a very compact area so what can we do is there a way of taking advantage of the physics of dipoles and having a compact Urban friendly ground footprint at the same time as always yes there is an option or rather several options that all rely on the same idea loading coils this can get really complicated but the general gist is that we can effectively shorten the length of a dipole antenna by coiling the antenna wire in a very specific way these coils reduce the overall length of the system so as far as physics is concerned we technically have 60 plus feet of wire but due to the coil the whole thing is shorter in the real world we see coils most often with VHF and UHF handhelds like from the movie Die Hard the handheld radios used in the movie had small stubby antennas how can this be well it's because inside that rubber casing is a coiled up antenna usually we see this for UHF radios that operate on the 70 centimeter band this is because these antennas can get away with being all coil and at those frequencies they're going to be a really short antenna anyway which is perfectly fine for short range Communications such as up and down nakatami Plaza but for comparatively lower frequencies such as the shortwave Arena we can't really get away with having an antenna that is 100 coil it would be cool if that would work but in actuality it doesn't this is where these kinds of micro antennas come back in they are almost entirely made of a very long coil of thin wire with a very short aerial taking what we have already learned these kinds of antennas usually have an imp possibly High Q factor if we were to look at an SWR of this kind of antenna this is what it might look like forget having resonance on a band you will be lucky to make this antenna resonant on a single frequency and you might not even be able to work all modes sometimes you might only have success with really low bandwidth modes like CW since the Q factor on these is so high these antennas are super frustrating to tune this was a huge mistake of mine that I had to learn when I was first getting into radio years ago with a high Q antenna tuning it to the right frequency by ear takes forever and under real world field conditions where you're trying to get a message out clandestinely it's just not possible with these kinds of antennas you also need at least half a dozen radials radiating elements are again a topic for another day but suffice it to say you think you can get away with just the stock photo on the website but no you actually need a lot of ground space to spread out some radial wires in an attempt to flatten out the Q factor and increase your bandwidth the tiny bit all of this takes time so bringing our goals back into the equation we can't really use an antenna that takes forever to tune and is super frustrating to work with in field conditions where muscle memory is a huge thing this is just not a something that's going to work if all of that is a bit confusing I understand but just think of this general rule of thumb the more coils you have in your antenna the higher Q or narrow or bandwidth you have to work with so in effect the more compact the antenna the narrower the bandwidth and the more frustrating it is to tune this means that these options are usually a no-go for what we are going for clandestine but still effective antennas that are easy to set up and use in situations where the in placement is important so what's the solution then if these small antennas won't work what's the what's the happy medium well a company called buddy pole has one answer this company started years ago with a very specific idea to industrialize the process of making loaded coil dive pole antennas the Buddy pole and the subsequent buddy stick are technically both loaded coil off center fed or center-fed dipoles over the course of human events this is the best compromise we have come up with so far with a buddy Pole or buddy stick system you have some of the benefits of a dipole and some of the compromises of a compact antenna on these antennas the Q is higher but it's not as bad as the more compact antennas and once you get it tuned just right you can usually move up and down a band just like you would with a normal traditional dipole the Q factor is not so bad as to limit you to just part of a band usually when you get these tuned in you can move up and down a band without retuning it every single time if you wanted to change bands you would need to retune it but you would need to buy a whole new antenna so there's that benefit this setup allows us to have the smallest ground footprint possible for working HF radio while still having a respectably low SWR and an appropriate SWR curve or an acceptable Q factor right balancing every important factor nicely for me what has worked really well has been using a buddy stick in a very small lot I purchased the Buddy stick system but also got the tent pole style aerial with what buddy pole calls the Stinger attachment to make tuning a lot easier this allowed me to set up the antenna as compactly as possible remember the Buddy stick is still basically just a dipole so it absolutely needs a radial you can't just use the vertical element with the coil to be resonant the radial is mandatory because technically it's not really a radial it's the other leg of the dipole but by setting things up the way I have the radial can be much shorter than you might think this is one very specific way to sort of cheat physics using a loaded dipole with a vertical element and a short radial which is actually the other leg of the dipole how effective is this solution from my own experience it does work it's not ideal by any means after all you're always working with a compromised antenna the question is how compromised is it this solution may be a lot more compromised than you want but it is an option and if it's all you've got it's all you've got especially if you want to stick with the resonant antenna in the smallest possible space so this is an option that I've used with pretty good success in the past now there is one other option that we have to cover in the field of resonant antennas it's another one of those Game Changer antennas that seems like it would be perfect blowing all other antennas out of the water these are magnetic loop antennas most commonly called mag Loop antennas these are Ultra compact resonant antennas that are most commonly used to get around Homeowner Association rules regarding antennas in case you haven't figured it out by now there's a lot of overlap between the world of Espionage antennas and the solutions that people have worked out in order to get around tyrannical HOA rules and the mag Loop is one way to do this how these work is a bit beyond the scope of this video so we'll have to discuss that some other time but the key takeaways is that mag Loops are super calm compact so they work really great up in attics or even on a desktop however there are some downsides that are deal breakers for some as you might have guessed there is no way of getting around physics there's no magical way to get away with a small compact antenna system without some serious compromises and one of the biggest compromises with these is that these antennas have to be tuned for each band you want to operate on sort of like a buddy stick but a lot more finicky at times the real problem for some is that these antennas usually have a super high Q factor depending on the type of Mag Loop products vary of course by different manufacturers so if it's a poorly made mag loop I would go so far as to say that these might have an insanely High cue so much so that it takes quite a bit of time to tune to a point of decent resonance some people might balk at that having lots of experience with mag loops and thus knowing they're geared to the point that it's it's not a problem but for me I like to hop around bands quickly almost always in austere field conditions where the set up is less than ideal so for me mag Loops are too much of a headache however for the person that doesn't mind staying on one band or likes fiddling with things to tune up a good SWR mag Loops are great and they are really the only option that works for people in super small apartments where they don't want their antenna to be seen by any curious eyes outside if you can get away with stringing up a loaded dipole on a balcony or out of a window or something like that or if you're super lucky and you can string an infant half wave out of a window and into like a tree or something that would be infinitely better in in my opinion than using a MAG Loop but if you are just flat out stuck and you still want to get on the air the mag Loop is pretty much all you've got the other major downside of Mag Loops is price mag Loop antennas are pretty much the most expensive antennas you can buy sometimes you might even pay more for the antenna than the HF radio you are using so these are automatically not an option for many people but again if you are limited to a super small area like a balcony or apartment and you can't get away with anything else mag Loops are pretty much all you've got so that's pretty much it for resonant antenna options all of these work in their own ways and have advantages and disadvantages if you want to stick with resonant antennas this is what you've got to work with however like clockwork there is another path you can take this path relies on using antenna tuners and a usually random piece of wire and this is where the fist fights break out because there are Die Hard Defenders of Both Worlds those who prefer resonant antennas and those who use tuners to match their radio to whatever piece of wire they are using here's the reason for this conflict those who prefer resonant antennas view tuners as unsportsmanlike viewing resonant antennas as the purest form of radio this is not an elitist kind of attitude there's good reasons for this because there's also the general impression that resonant antennas are more sensitive and more efficient than using a tuner in the other Corner those who use tuners say that tuners are a great way of improving a not so great antenna emplacement and in many cases allow people to get on the air that ordinarily would not be able to get on the air because they don't have the space or the geometry for a resonant antenna antenna tuners have also earned a place in the prepping Community because the wire you use for an antenna can just be a random piece of metal plenty of people have hooked up their radio and their tuner to gutter downspouts or metal roofing or a metal fence or any large piece of metal and using their tuner they can get on the air pretty effectively so how did tuners work well it's a bit complicated but the gist of it here is that automatic antenna tuners contain a bunch of relays and Hardware that sort of Tricks your radio into thinking that it's getting a good SWR this is why the guys who like resonant antennas say that tuners allow people to be very lazy with their antenna setups because there's a lot of misconception of how antenna tuners actually work this this is why using SWR as a metric for determining how good your antenna is well that can lead you astray there's so much more to antenna Theory than just SWR you can have a guy get a garbage antenna string it up very ineffectively hook up a tuner and get a decent SWR people think an antenna tuner is magically making their antenna great it's not the main thing tuners do is allowing you to transmit with a garbage non-resonant antenna without harming your radio so when you hook up a tuner and magically your SWR comes down on the band you want your antenna didn't change at all the tuner only matched the impedance of the antenna and the coax to the radio to make the radio happy in truth there is no such thing as an antenna tuner the tuner is not doing anything to the antenna really antenna tuners are technically matching units or matching Transformers matching the radio to the proper impotence for whatever antenna you using this is how tuners can lead you astray you can get into a situation where your tuner is telling you that you have a good SWR but that SWR isn't telling you the whole story again this is why we can't always use SWR as a metric for determining how good your antenna really is with a tuner your radio is being tricked into thinking that your antenna is resonant so in reality antenna tuners are mostly a safety device making your radio function in situations where the SWR is so high that you would break your radio tuners bring the SWR down artificially so you can safely and effectively transmit but we have to remember that your antenna itself didn't change it still has a high SWR nothing changed there the only thing that changed is that that reflected power is being reflected back into the tuner instead of your radio so the bottom line is this you hook up your radio to an antenna and you check the SWR and it's not great it may be a four or five or even higher you plug in your 10 tuner hit the button and boom you have an SWR of one to one or something like that this does not mean that your antenna magically got better your antenna is still not really resonant it's still a garbage antenna the only thing that changed is now your radio is happy and content with pushing power into that antenna because all of that nasty reflected current is being absorbed by the tuner and not being sent back into the radio that's why the world of antenna tuners is kind of a lie yes you can hook a tuner up to a wire fence or a gutter downspout and you can get a perfect match but you're still not going to be pushing hardly any power out most of it's going to get reflected back into the tuner if you are planning on using a tuner to cheat physics I'm sorry but that's just not the case you can't really do that so if the cake is a lie when it comes to tuners do antenna tuners still have a place are they still worth the sometimes Hefty investment in some situations yes I personally prefer resonant antennas because I'm almost always running in qrp comms very very low power however there are times when a tuner is Handy for instance I can string up my chameleon lefts and add the 80 meter extension to get as much wire up into the air as possible then I can add in a tuner to get me down to 160 meters if I want ordinarily my radio would Revolt if I tried to key up on 160 meters without a tuner but with a tuner everything is fine in terms of the true energy that is being radiated by the antenna you know nothing changes and the tuner is not increasing my range at all but it does allow me to use my radio it allows it to function without breaking even when using an antenna that is not really resonant a very common setup with using a tuner is pretty simple it starts with just a piece of wire this is usually called a long wire antenna or a random wire antenna A simple piece of wire of random or unknown length as much wire is physically possible is strung up again as high as possible and that wire is attached to the tuner which is then connected to the radio the radio is turned on tuned and you are good to go how long should the wire be technically it doesn't matter and nobody can really answer that to be honest as long as possible is the general answer people give this is where tuners really shine when you only have a small area to work with and you are just a bit too short to use a proper antenna for instance let's say you have a small backyard or a small attic and you want to get on 40 meters with a dipole or something but you've clearly not got enough space just properly string up a 40 meter dipole or in-fed half wave you could string it up as best you can you could wrap it around the perimeter of a fence spreading it out as best as you can and the extra wire you can run wherever possible now if you did this and you checked your SWR you might find that it's a three to one or a four to one or something less than ideal remember dipoles need to be stretched out in a straight line as possible to be as resonant as possible you start scrunching up the wire in an attempts to make it fit your environment and and your SWR might start to creep up if we are trying to be as covert as possible tuners can be a huge benefit from World War II to the Afghan war operatives on all sides have made use of random wire antennas that simply blend into their landscape one of the most common is the simple clothesline though not as common today in wealthy modern westernized cities clotheslines strung up in backyards or in between buildings are extremely common throughout Eastern Europe Asia the Middle East and the entire third world even in westernized Nations rural areas are common places to find the simple clothesline lines which sometimes conceal a shortwave antenna trees have also been used to conceal antennas with vertical elements going right up the trunk to the top of the tree if needed depending on the setup this could also provide some limited directionality if needed to confuse and confound Direction finding efforts but unless you have a tree or a clothesline that is the exact right height or length chances are you will need a tuner in order to make the most out of a less than ideal clandestine setup if you had the room for it and if your background noise isn't too bad a dipole or invet half wave would be great but if not a random length of wire as long as possible can be strung up however possible and a tuner can be used to get you the rest of the way toward an acceptable SWR you aren't going to improve your transmission range at all it's not going to magically make your antenna awesome but you are going to make your radio able to function albeit not as great whereas without a tuner you wouldn't be able to key up at all looking back in time we can see that almost every radio used by clandestine agents had a tuner of some kind why is this well because in placing an antenna was already very risky so it wouldn't do well for a spy to have to keep going back to the antenna to lengthen or shorten it if it was in place in a less than ideal location sometimes a covert radio operator only had one chance to get an antenna up and once it was up they had to make it work no matter how garbage the SWR was this is why antenna tuners were and still are critical tools of the Spy toolbox in one specific case Norwegian resistance agents had trouble using their assigned frequency to communicate with higher headquarters these operatives were tasked with observing German shipping along the coast of Norway in 1943 already operating in an extremely risky environment as German Coastal Patrol Boats were constantly Direction finding their Transmissions British MI6 agents were dismayed to discover that environmental conditions and the extremely remote locations of observation posts meant that the frequencies had to be changed quite often just to make contact and since frequencies had to be changed often anyway to avoid detection this became a huge problem of frequency management eventually operatives settled on using nighttime only frequencies in the 40 meter band which worked best along the IC Norwegian Coastline however these problems could have been alleviated somewhat if better technology such as better tuners were available at the time which could have made contacts a lot easier under those less than ideal antenna and placement conditions looking forward a bit in time one of the most widely used radios specifically designed and for stay behind operations under NATO's gladio program the fs 5000 was a highly modular shortwave radio system a core component of the radio itself was the antenna tuner which was designed to work with a 15 meter long random wire antenna this is one of the main reasons why it's so difficult to find out information on what antennas were most useful for those operating clandestinely most of the time they used a simple random wire antenna with a tuner So the antenna doesn't get documented as much also in the early days of vacuum tube based radios the antenna was not as big of a deal as it is with today's radios tube based radios were a lot more forgiving in this regard and were able to adapt a bit more easily to the antenna remember there is no cheating physics no matter how hard we try things can get really confusing really quickly there are so many ways of trying to get around the rules but in the end physics always wins you might say all of this is well and good but let's take a look at what this might look like in the real world keeping with the idea of stay behind operations we have to realize that radio communication is very important but also quite tedious even today the most die-hard ham radio operators would not entirely be thrilled if they were mandated to conduct comchecks and exchange messages every single day in accordance with a comp plan rain or shine 24 7. the mundane nature of the requirements of clindostan radio comms can turn a fun hobby into a tedious chore this adds in another important factor convenience if we look back through history convenience was a top priority as well for most stay behind forces specifically the civilian operatives that might one day fall under the command of the military side of things they had to live somewhat double lives for instance civilian operatives of Switzerland's stay behind group p26 were expected and required to have a day job prior to joining which would provide appropriate cover for their clandestine activities having a day job while also running a secret life is tough work in Austria something similar was also underway friends Ola created a fun organization station called the osterichester van der sport on gazelle in English the Austrian hiking Sport and Social Club this was a nice little group of a few thousand members who like to hike around the countryside compete in various sporting functions and play with copious amounts of plastic explosives that's right one of the largest stay behind organizations ever operated secretly under the guise of a hiking club and keeping up this double life on a daily basis was no picnic so it's best to make things as simple and easy and convenient as possible especially when it comes to Communications which is a lot to expect from most shortwave antennas going out into a dark and stormy night standing in the middle of the woods with a tangled bird's nest of wire is pretty frustrating but even more so if you are trying to quickly get set up to exchange a few messages before you take a few hours rest so we've honestly got a lot of unreasonable demands we need a covert antenna that functions is compact yet easy to tune oh and it has to be really convenient to put up and take down down on a daily basis speaking generally about what we've talked about already we can have a really efficient dipole or in-fed half wave antenna but it's huge and requires a lot of ground space or we can use a loaded coil system and hope that we have enough space for radials or we can use a compact mag loop antenna which is a super high q but may work for us if we don't plan on jumping around a lot or we can use a random piece of wire with a tuner and hope that we have enough power at that moment with that configuration to send the message keeping in mind that there is no blanket solution for any of this and things are constantly evolving in the communications World there are some general solutions that may work in many situations first let's start off with my preferred antenna syst

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the ukrainian war intelligence update for saturday the 26th of february 2022. so let's get right to it i don't have too much information coming out of europe today i've really been focused on trying to figure out where the front lines are but there has been some pretty big news with regards to sanctions the eu has stated that they will be closing european union airspace to all russian aircraft we're still waiting on a bit of clarification on that because that would mean that more or less the entire continent of europe's airspace would be closed to russia and that would actually be a pretty significant move to counter russia's actions in ukraine but again russia would have had to have planned for this and could have guessed that this would happen so who really knows if this is going to affect russia that much plus russia has a lot of trading partners out in the far east and in the rest of asia so really trying to figure out what this is going to mean for russia and what the actual details are the european union has also agreed to cut off some russian banks from the swift banking system which i will admit i did not think they would do but again we will have to see what banks get cut off with these sanctions because as with all sanctions the devil is in the details and we'll have to actually go through and read the actual documents and not a news story on the documents to see what is actually going to happen to russia with regards to sanctions in russia alexander chulakov was found dead this morning allegedly taking his own life i say allegedly because much like other powerful figures in the world top-ranking politicians oligarchs and important people in russia do not normally meet to their end by natural or their own causes and alexander tulikov was the financial director for the entirety of gazprom russia's biggest energy monopoly and is the largest natural gas company in the world along these same lines and because i didn't have anywhere to put it there are rumors of dissension within the top-ranking politicians in russia again with propaganda flying everywhere from all sides at this point it's really hard to say what is actually going on and it is very unlikely that we're going to have any kind of information gathering capability behind closed doors in russia's top political sphere however rumors are running rampant right now that a lot of dissension is breaking out between some of the old guard in russian political structures and some of putin's closer friends and associates and things like that a lot allegedly a lot of people were kept in the dark in russian high society with regards to this ukraine situation and they're not too happy about it because like we're getting ready to talk about in a bit uh the invasion is not exactly going as smoothly as one would have hoped right it's not a complete and decisive uh conflict just yet uh russia is having to fight for every inch of terrain they get uh for the most part we'll talk about that again in on the fronts but i just wanted to mention that there are inklings of some dissension going on within within russia's political sphere much like the rest of europe which is completely and utterly disorganized in shambles with regards to the sanctions like i mentioned last time things aren't exactly perfect in russia either so i guess we'll have to see what comes of this we'll be on the lookout for any kind of indicators of squabbling going on but really i just wanted to point it out because it might be an it might be a factor for how this ukrainian conflict goes in the future i'm going to skip over the naval updates for today because i don't really have anything constructive to add and we'll talk about the black sea here in just a bit but moving on to the overall operating picture intel gaps are many and wide regarding the positions of the front lines at this stage russia continues her assault on all fronts though there has been a measurable decrease in the speed at which forces have been moving many russian units have been scattered on various fronts or are black on logistics like food water and ammunition much like yesterday russia's advance seems to be the most speedy down south along the crimean front but this is likely due to the open terrain and lack of significant populated areas to hold up the russians in places like urban centers or the more densely populated areas around the country russian forces are being observably bogged down by both ukrainian military actions and civilian efforts to slow their advance as to whether or not this will be effective enough time will have to tell on that again we are continuing to see russian forces being sent into action piecemeal which if you step back and look at things from a historical perspective is almost morbidly ironic considering the historical significance of this exact terrain it was almost 80 years ago that the german sixth army was advancing across what is now ukraine to fight that battle that would decide their fate at stalingrad which was renamed as volgograd after the war and both belligerents of the current war are echoing some of the same tactics used by both sides during the conflict during world war ii ukraine is taking the fight to the cities and letting their invader come deeper and deeper into their territory so that she stretches her supply lines thin russia is echoing the ghost of yetumenka by not taking advantage of the doctrine of massing her forces sending relatively smaller units into battle piecemeal when she should and could be sending in massive coordinated waves of troops ukraine on the other hand is a much smaller and more disadvantaged force but still somehow is managing to deny the russians the air even if it is mostly with shoulder-launched man pads russia seemingly ignorant or dismissive of the importance of air power has not yet dedicated enough aerial forces for this conflict and is now beginning to pay the price for it russia also largely relying on speed and rapidly advancing armored columns have begun to realize that a blitzkrieg might be an effective tactic but it requires fuel and logistics to make it work and putin surrounding himself with yes men instead of people who know what they are doing might be a pretty big reason for the losses that have been sustained taking the initiative to rapidly pierce deep into enemy terrain has been proven to withstand the test of time in the field of warfare but it does have its downsides punching deep into enemy terrain is all fine and dandy until you realize that you have no supplies and you are deep inside enemy terrain i think that all of these observations are utterly fascinating to those who study history and though i certainly don't think that this is an exact parallel to the stalingrad campaign these observations are plain as day to us here so i just wanted to point this out to anyone who might also be thinking along the same lines both the ukrainians and the russians are cherry-picking the best and sometimes the worst parts of their own history in order to fight this war before we get to each front let's briefly examine the iff markers that russia has been observed to be using since we're getting a lot of questions about this for the most part russian forces are using alphanumeric letters to identify friend or foe or iff this is extremely common for all militaries to do and extremely important for russia because ukraine has pretty much the same equipment so having some measure to tell each other apart is important however there has been some variation between the iff markers used some units stationed in the east have the letter v on their vehicles some from crimea have the letter o like the forces from belarus so just remember that as you see the thousands of videos or pictures that are coming out there's a little bit of variation between these on the northeastern front more or less a united front has emerged with russian forces linking up from cherniv konotop sumi and kharkiv i do want to caveat that by saying there's a big uncertainty bubble right there in the middle between kanotop and cherniv because we don't exactly know if this link up has occurred or not the troops in konatop have have been experiencing great difficulties just surviving over the past day or so so we don't really know if this nice flip we have drawn on the slide here is an accurate line or we don't we don't know if this is a complete line or if this is just pockets of front lines as russia moves forward either way this has occurred with great difficulty and at great cost to the russians like i mentioned locals in the vicinity of kanatop are reporting that russians are scavenging for fuel and supplies lots of single tanks and single btrs are also noticed to be driving around sometimes instead of in column form i don't know if this is an isolated event but it seems like some units in countertop have gotten lost or been the only survivors of their column it's hard to say the situation is far too fluid to make a judgment call either way but it is certain to say that the situation is quite serious in countertop for the russians this grants a little bit of credence to our earlier assessments that russian logistics are not nearly adequate enough for a slow-paced assault plus the downsides of russian doctrine are coming out now heavily relying on the battalion tactical group while an adequate tool for the task of invading a nation like ukraine still presents problems when it comes to the allocation of logistics bringing in btgs from all over russia and having them work together in a non-traditional command structure has got to be a logistical nightmare in other words the russian army is right now figuring out their logistical limits and they are figuring it out the hard way so over the coming days we will see how big of a problem logistics will be for the russians along the central part of the northeastern front sumi has been retaken by ukrainian forces with the assistance of local citizens who have been helping with the defense of their city with kiev being a primary target russia appears to have made the decision to break contact with ukrainian forces in the vicinity of sumi or tie up ukrainian forces so that other armor divisions can maneuver around sumi and head for kiev this is an interesting play for anyone who knows what the word salient means so if russia has indeed decided to encircle and bypass sumi this could be a significant vulnerability that ukraine could exploit if they try this tactic in other places along the eastern front not much new information to report it looks like a lot of the civilians out east have already started to kind of move away from the area so information is going to be kind of spotty probably from here on out on the eastern front we do know that an amphibious landing did occur in the vicinity of marapol though we don't know any other details besides that but this amphibious landing will be important for the rest of the southern front which we'll talk about now along the southern front the situation remains much the same with kirsan still in ukrainian hands though there is fighting in the city right now in the city might have been lost over the past few hours it's hard to tell there are also reports of russian troops fighting in miyakev right now just to the north of kirusan but again it's really uncertain and the front line is very fluid in this area so we'll have to wait and see what the line actually turns out to be and probably by tomorrow or a few days from now it's possible that russian troops are doing what they have done up in the northeast in sumi where some russian forces encircle a city and tie up ukrainian forces while other russian units maneuver around and bypass the city entirely whether or not russia has the forces to keep doing this leapfrog action remains to be seen but it seems to be attacked that they have started to use in the past couple of days along the eastern portion of the southern front advances continue to be made in the vicinity of mara pole and like i mentioned the amphibious forces that have landed in the vicinity of marapol will be very much needed in order to secure the city remember here in the south this terrain is wide open and this kind of terrain is exactly where russia maintains an overwhelming advantage which is why their advance has been so fast however that advantage rapidly diminishes in the urbanized areas and in areas that require the use of paratroopers to win decisively which we will talk about when we get to kiev along the western front not very much new to report moldova continues to accept refugees as does romania hungary and slovakia so there's that for those who are concerned about refugee movement in transnistria we've tried to do some digging and get to the bottom of what's been going on there and it looks like russia only has about one or two btgs worth of troops there so maybe maybe a thousand troops top that's just kind of a rough guess so that's really not enough to do anything with in fact the tensions with moldova right now moldova the rest of moldova supporting ukraine in this conflict that tension there has probably got those russian troops and transnistria a little bit more concerned with their own security than was conducting any kind of operation within ukraine plus just looking at the map the southwestern portion of ukraine is very much a low population density area so they've got to punch a long way before they actually get to anything that's militarily significant so is probably going to be very much an irrelevant front uh for this conflict but again we'll still keep an eye on it and see what goes on with russia taking more and more losses there's no telling what they might do up north on the northwestern front limited fighting has been observed within the outskirts of kiev but again we have one of those little uncertainty bubbles here because the terrain between chernobyl and kiev is highly dynamic and very fluid at this moment so we don't really know what's going on uh in in the area between chernobyl and kiev uh just other than fighting is occurring but it's it's very sporadic it's not like there's a fluid front line that we can draw for you but let's get into kiev in kiev proper fighting has broken out all around the city today as russian forces continue their attempts to use helicopter assault forces to conduct air assault operations to seize and hold critical targets that will allow fixed-wing operations bringing in even more troops efficiently in other words for those of you who don't speak staff officer russia has been putting a lot of troops on a lot of helicopters and flying them into locations near airports so that they can seize the airports and therefore allow bigger aircraft to land and offload troops and supplies the fight for kiev might be a long and drawn out affair so russia is going to have to seize all of the airports in the area for that fight to actually be a victory russia has also been conducting many devastating airborne paratrooper drops for the same reason and i say devastating because these attempts have been very costly for the russians ukrainian forces have learned quite a bit and have been taking advantage of every weapon system that they have and concentrating those weapon systems in and around all prospective paratrooper landing zones there are only so many places a helicopter or a paratrooper can land which is something that the ukrainians know full well and the russians learned today ukraine even shot down two il-76 over kiev today both of which were allegedly fully loaded with russian paratroopers we're still waiting on photos of the wreckages to confirm this with any certainty as always but that might take a while since one wreckage apparently came down a few miles outside of kiev in the vicinity of vasilkev and the other much further south about 20k out from the city if this is true and two il-76s have been shot down by a ukrainian su-27 as is being claimed this is going to sting for russia as these can carry between 150 and 200 paratroopers depending on configuration and what the pilot is willing to fly with as far as weight numbers wise it's not a huge blow to the forces that have already been committed for the invasion russia has hundreds of il-76s but it's not nothing more importantly this indicates that the ukrainian air force might still have some fight left in them maybe though i'm not really sure how but this definitely proves that russia has not been able to achieve aerial superiority in the skies over kiev just yet aerial superiority which will 100 percent be a requirement for this invasion to go much further also in kiev civil defense preparations by civilians are fully underway with dozens of photos and videos showing the thousands of molotov cocktails that civilians have prepared for the upcoming urban fighting molotov cocktails are a cheap and easy munition to make and one which is devastatingly effective against pretty much all armored vehicles when massed in concentration as has been observed during the ukrainian war so far 30 or 40 ukrainian citizens with 30 or 40 molotov cocktails in their hands taking on a single btr might not seem that effective but so far in the previous fighting this has been observed to be a very valuable tactic and that's not considering the psychological effectiveness of such a crude but gruesome weapon system additionally the interior ministry of ukraine has asked all citizens to turn off their cell phones or only use them in emergencies due to russia's capabilities to detect cell phone signals and therefore detect large groups of people which could be targeted easily again this highlights how important electronic warfare has become in modern conflict and how even civilians must consider the risks that their smartphone brings to the table along the civilian front not too many changes from yesterday although i would like to point out that ukraine's neighbors to the west poland slovakia hungary romania and moldova have been more than willing to accept ukrainian refugees there hasn't been any hang-ups on this on this part other than the traffic to get to the border it looks like that's going pretty smoothly right now but again we have to remember that even though it's a good thing to see nations stepping up and taking uh people away from combat zones who don't want to be in combat zones right it's good to see european nations accepting refugees from this conflict right we also have to remember that europe is a political entity and nation states are political entities and this invitation might not last uh forever so unfortunately we have to think about things like this as we know the invitations for afghan refugees just four months ago was handled with not as much good-naturedness as one might have hoped from european nations now again the afghan culture and the ukrainian culture is very different so i think that kind of a side note is the reason why nations in europe are kind of hesitant to take afghan refugees is because of cultural reasons but and and of course historical political stuff um but i do just want to point out that hey even though nation states are doing the right thing right now or at least trying to with regards to refugees that might not be the case forever just wanted to point that out and that's pretty much all i've got for now we've as a side project been working on a sort of a briefing of or this might just turn into a slide on one of these briefs of information that encapsulates world events that have happened while the world's eyes have been on ukraine because a lot of people are asking and rightfully so what else is happening while the world is you is distracted with ukraine and the answer is kind of a lot a lot of things are happening around the world everybody's asking us what do you think is going to happen about china what are they going to move on taiwan now because of this i don't know it seems like to answer that question just while i'm here i don't know i don't think so at the moment more than likely what china is going to do is wait a little bit longer and see what other sanctions europe comes up with because again russia and china are very different nations russia before this conflict and before their ruble dropped down to the bottom russia was not in as severe dire straits economically as china is china is barely functioning economically right now they've had a lot of economic problems and again the fight for taiwan is going to be a lot different fight than the ukrainian conflict so yes it is a valid concern to think that we might be witnessing global conflicts kicking off here but at the same time i would also like to stress that the fight for taiwan is going to be very very different and the nature of it's different is different strategically different operationally and different tactically so i don't think that is much of a concern at this stage that might change tomorrow who knows nobody really knows what china is going to do so i guess we'll have to call that and play that by ear as far as other stuff going on around the world we're also keeping an eye on the united states that is for us who for for those of us who are located here in the united states that is a much more pressing concern than ukraine even though ukraine's the ukrainian wars impacts are being felt here in the united states in the form of cyber attacks and just uncertainty and of course the market implications but some of the stuff that's been going on in the u.s with regards to um tracking protesters and intelligence collection on uh american citizens on u.s soil some of that stuff we'll have to get into a little bit deeper as time goes on i just wanted to let everybody know that we are thinking about it we are seeing this stuff and we're not neglecting it uh just because ukraine is still going on um we're trying to get as much out there as we possibly can but again we're a pretty small team here so we're doing what we can so again that's all i've got for right now thanks again everyone for your support and we'll see you next time and as always fight in the shade

hello again everyone welcome back to the underground this is the afghanistan update for august 28th into the 29th uh this is probably going to be one of the last ones that we do as the situation is uh rapidly concluding for better or for worse so i just wanted to give a good solid update with what little information we have before things turned sour so as one might expect the hkai area security situation has deteriorated significantly we're continuing to see enduring threats of additional follow-on ied attacks that will continue as long as there are americans still in that country now as far as who who are actually committing these ied attacks uh if you ask the us government it's isis uh however being on the outside looking in a lot of people who are not familiar with how afghanistan works people will listen and they will listen to the the pundits on the tv when they say that the taliban and isis are enemies and that's largely true the taliban has been fighting isis for a very long time in afghanistan really ever since they popped up a few years ago however relationships in afghanistan like i mentioned days ago change with the wind and right now it would actually be a benefit for the taliban to allow isis to attack the united states the only reason holding them back is the taliban allegedly based on all the books we've read and the pundits we've listened to well the taliban hate isis right well think about it this way so if the taliban let or facilitate isis to attack the americans what do they get okay well for one they make the united states look bad and for the taliban that's always been a goal of theirs okay what else do they get well they kill as many americans as possible again something the taliban would love to see and most importantly they don't get any of the blame so even though it might be an analytical leap to say that the taliban is working with isis to attack the americans that that might be a leap right now generally speaking it wouldn't be out of the question to consider it because here's the thing the taliban are the taliban they lie that's what they do anyone who trusts the taliban even a little bit on anything is a complete lunatic and it does not take a high-level analyst to figure this out this is common sense so we're of course going to continue to see these ied attacks up until the united states leaves we're probably going to see a lot more attacks on u.s personnel from isis or the taliban or whoever right who's to say that these so-called isis militants that are attacking the americans not the ones attacking the taliban but the isis militants attacking the americans who's to say they aren't taliban pretending to be isis so they can get through and kill americans and not get any of the blame for it as we're pulling out of the country okay they've done it before why who's to say they haven't they aren't doing it now i know again that's an analytical leap but i just want to throw that idea out there as an alternate explanation as to what's going on with these threats also moving on the withdrawal is concluding it looks like the united states will be out of hkia and out of the country long before the deadline now as things go on like we've mentioned on a few other platforms the updates are going to be few and far between mostly because we're getting into remote terrain we're getting into few fewer and fewer cameras around not as many reporters and it you know it's just not a good situation for finding out information in the ocean world and now that the taliban control a good portion of the perimeter around hkia that ability to gather information is is severely reduced also shifting forward into pan shearer we're going to talk about that mostly on the map um but the conflict in pants here is expanding but it's also contracting in certain areas so let's go ahead and jump over to the map and we'll talk about that all right so here on the map uh really not that much information that we even have at this point the taliban of control can now control a lot of the space i haven't been able to figure out exactly where the taliban positions are but we have been able to determine that this intersection right here is closed to traffic uh they've completely shut it down and their ecp has uh or their security checkpoint for the taliban has pushed out to somewhere over here possibly further up airport road but this road is completely clear of traffic due to the taliban this main gate is also completely closed to all traffic as far as we can tell you can read other ocean reports about which gates are still open at hkia from what we're seeing it looks like we're done it looks like that all the gates are closed and we're pretty much done here so let's go ahead and talk about pan shear for a bit because that's going to be a point of concern moving forward so pushing north into panshir here sorry the labels are not showing up here in wintec spectacularly well but this is pensier valley now the taliban have been massing down here in the south but i don't really want to use the word massing because we haven't seen very many uh soldiers staying here we we have gotten a few videos on social media from taliban account taliban social media accounts uh showing them in this general vicinity but again it's really hard to geo-locate because they're filming it on cameras from like 1998. uh also up here we've got limited reports of fighting going on uh the taliban are trying to mass up here in this valley called the uh coast guarang valley it's hard to even find it on a map but this is where it's at and they are pushing south uh to try to get into uh anjuman pass so they're trying to take out the northern alliance guys that are up and down this pansier valley they're trying to come in from multiple angles likewise earlier today or actually earlier yesterday over here in barakshan the taliban tried to push south again into panshir and they just got slaughtered they just got murked over 500 fighters reportedly uh were were massacred here by the northern alliance now when it comes to figures on fighting in afghanistan for those of you who do not know tribal conflicts in afghanistan are very unique and they're like nowhere else in the world and largely when you see figures of numbers if it's numbers from an attack or or numbers of kia or casualties the numbers are going to be wildly inflated uh favorite pastime of uh the various tribal groups in afghanistan is for both groups to launch a deadly battle against each other and they meet each other on the battle space right they meet each other in a valley or something like that and they both start shooting at each other from beyond the maximum effective range of both of their weapon systems so you've got dudes with aks shooting at each other from miles away and up and just spraying and praying you know at an enemy that's on the in the next valley over and nobody gets hurt nobody gets killed but both sides claim to have killed like hundreds of enemy fighters so it's really hard to tell without a specific video showing bodies as to how many people have been killed now i'm more inclined to believe that the northern alliance at this particular time has been devastating the the taliban as they move into the area because the taliban have not had time to kind of get around and get into a good fighting position to cut these guys off however the northern alliance from what we're seeing and from the talks from massoud himself it looks like they're in the beginning stages of figuring out a surrender plan so it's still too early in the year for the the winter sort of drawdown and i don't think they're going to be able to hold out if they can hold out there were some reports earlier that uh the northern alliance were destroying bridges up and down the pansher valley that makes sense if you're trying to hold out to the winter time because this is very rugged terrain and if they blow the bridges they as they cross as they cross back up into the more remote areas they blow the bridges make it difficult for the taliban to advance and once the winter sets in it's going to be very difficult to weed those guys out of there however i don't know if they're going to be able to stand uh withstand the taliban up until that time it looks like they're probably going to end up surrendering very very soon and with the taliban massing in these different valleys and bringing up fighters from the south every single day along really the only road up into panshir it does not look good for the northern alliance moving forward now there might be little pockets of resistance this is afghanistan right a lot of these guys have never really left their district their entire lives so of course there will be pockets of resistance even when the taliban was in power there were pockets of resistance all around the country and it's going to be hard to say are they going to mass forward and unite or or what a lot of this terrain is just too rugged to fight in for any major major fights right so it's going to be very small skirmishes and things like that so i guess we'll see how this shakes out but that's really all the information that we have right now uh we're still working on different options a lot of uh countries have have issued press statements about refugees we do know that the taliban control uh within significant numbers uh the afghan side of the twerkum gate so i mean it's really not good and then the road the only the only single road south which the taliban have known about for years like i mentioned uh is is very heavily monitored by the taliban we know there are checkpoints all along this road down to the chaman crossing but we really don't know where they're at i'm sure the u.s military knows with all their classified information and their billion-dollar drones overhead but it's unlikely that they're going to pass that information to civilians at this point so again that's really all i have we're going to continue to develop out and see see if we can find things but really the situation is not looking super great and on the diplomatic and the political front uh even the social front things are not getting things are not super great right now so again we're posting all these products the ones that we think can help people get out uh without being a risk to them online and you can check these things out as time goes on but it looks like we're winding things down here uh when it comes to how effective we can be and again i wanted to show this slide again even though at this point it is a completely moot point and before we conclude for today i wanted to convey a few thoughts um i know that right now like i myself mentioned a while ago everyone on the internet has an opinion and not very many people want to listen to some random dude on the internet rant and rave about things but i do think that some of these thoughts might be helpful for people to hear or if maybe not helpful at least they might resonate with some people so the back end of this youtube video will be a sort of mini podcast on some ideas that i think are important we here always try to encourage different ways of thinking about an issue and what i have to say i think has some value for some we understand that since this afghanistan atrocity kicked off we've gotten a lot of new viewers and a lot of new people being aware of our organization such that it is this has happened many times before and it's nothing new we here see people come and go all the time we understand that in today's world there are consequences for having and expressing an opinion i am saying all of this in order to sort of set expectations and convey our goals our goals specifically with this afghanistan crisis are obviously to save lives but our goals are also to pick up the slack when the us government or the us military cannot complete the mission we've seen a lot of brave actions on the ground in afghanistan over the past week and a lot of things that are not being disclosed are purely insanely heroic but at the exact same time i myself am sick and tired of this mentality in which certain people think they have the monopoly on knowledge itself and right now we're getting to the point where the us government is not able to help but they also don't want anyone else to help lest god forbid something occur that they weren't expecting the brovet mentality has transitioned from an annoyance to something that is going to lead to more and more problems not just in afghanistan but throughout the rest of our society as well it's a small country and it's getting smaller and smaller with only a few ways out we cannot change geography and we cannot remove the knowledge of geography from the minds of malign actors they know the terrain they won the war right now with the country crumbling we have to weigh decisions we have to decide is a piece of information going to do more harm than good and right now opsec on most things in afghanistan is a completely moot point we of course need to be smart but we also do not need to smother the situation in opsec so much that we are doing more harm than good the taliban and isis know where the roads are they know where every culvert every drainage ditch every base every ambush site and every route out of the country is but the people that might need that information to escape do not it is not our fault that we lost the afghan war and it is not our fault that the us government and senior military leadership got us into this mess and it is not our fault that this operation was a fiasco right from the start with senior military officers on the ground being more concerned with getting into pissing matches with each other than actually solving the problem and you know what when the u.s forces leave it is highly likely that there will still be people on the ground who need to get out who's going to help them then is it going to be an analyst snuggled up in their skiff watching you vids and merc chat but not actually contributing anything to the mission because the guys with cry pants on hold the monopoly on the war the war that we ended up losing i have personally been to afghanistan very recently i know how the game is played when it comes to certain actors within that conflict the dunning-kruger effect is why we lost the afghan war i'll say that one more time for the people in the back the dunning-kruger effect is why we lost the afghan war there are a whole host of other reasons too but this one is the one that hits closest to home right now and right now it is also why a lot more innocent people are going to get killed before this is all over we will never forget that the united states and military leadership was always planning to leave people behind the only reason that evacuations were started in the first place is because the u.s military got caught trying to sneak out they never plan to evacuate any significant number of americans they plan to evacuate the embassy hop on a c-17 at h kaya and leave but they got caught and the videos of people falling off airplanes caused a pr disaster that forced the politicians and the military to act and that right there is something that both civilians and service members alike would do well to remember atrocities bring out the best and worst kinds of people and we ourselves have experienced far more of the latter than the former during this crisis the people that we expected to solve this problem have let us down the guys at the bottom of the totem pole in the military civilians and the kindness of strangers has saved more americans than anyone ever could have expected and since the afghanistan fiasco specifically the failures of leadership are becoming an allegory for problems here at home we should all do well to remember that the afghanistan disaster is a result of the concerns we've been expressing for months and when this thing is over the problems within our institutions will still exist i know this is not a very nice way to end today's video but that's the mood for the week i guess the situation is raw and riddled with all kinds of emotions and our anger here is second to none and sometimes people have to get things off their chest sort of like what i'm doing right now i suppose but at the end of the day the world is a violent and nasty place and emotions do not solve many problems we can be angry at congress or the president or the taliban or isis but that anger does not change things like i mentioned in the regular intel brief from just a few days ago this afghanistan fiasco is bringing up a lot of stuff it's airing a lot of dirty laundry and these things are not pleasant to even think about much less talk about in the open so for those of you who have stuck around this far and have found this information to be useful thank you we are absolutely grateful for everyone who has stuck around and helped us out over the years especially as we have recently started taking on more projects and expanding into new areas we will continue to try to do good work in best way that we know how even if that work upsets a few people that would rather us not expose their incompetence or naivety remember just like i said a few weeks ago in the system that we have right now in the geopolitical and social and economic status that we have in the united states we cannot have anyone solving problems because solving a problem implies that a problem exists and we cannot have any problems in the current regime this kind of mentality and this idea is trickling down to institutions that we didn't think it would ever trickle down to not everyone has to agree with us nor would we ever want that a culture of yes men is directly responsible for part of the atrocities that have occurred at hamid karzai international airport we would also like everyone ourselves included to expand their thought process to include new ideas or alternative ways of thinking about a problem even if that thought process leads us to thinking about things that we would rather remain blissfully ignorant of the times in which we live are tough they're only getting tougher so let's meet that challenge head on and try to do good things and with that that's all i have for today thank you again for everyone that has helped to get people out of afghanistan and thank you to the service members who have done their best during this fiasco despite the dangerous incompetence of their leadership and thank you to everyone out there who is facing insurmountable odds to make the world a better place so keep on moving forward and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade

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Kind: captions Language: en hello everyone and welcome back to part three of our series on escape and concealment so uh we were going to have part three be a continuation of the uh restraint escape and we're going to talk about different kinds of european style russian czech style handcuffs and hand restraints but we've actually hit a little bit of a snag uh it turns out that we in our training exercises you know internally here at the shop have snapped off keys and all of the keyways of our foreign style handcuffs so that's going to have to wait for a little bit while we get some more imported in from europe so yeah that should sort of tell you as to how that episode is going to go but in order to put out as much content as possible we already had this sort of part four ready um but we're going to go ahead and put it push it out as part three and this series this particular episode in the series is going to talk about our sort of seer kit type stuff so this is the episode we're going to talk about um that we think is probably going to get a lot more traffic because everybody likes gear a lot more than you know sort of education or training right so we're going to go over all of the gear and stuff in our sort of seer setup now uh the reason that we're talking about this and where we sort of got our motivation from is a few years ago quite a few years ago in 2013 uh this whole seer kit ideology became very very popular and this happened because a a time magazine article was written about in response to special warfare group navy devgrew seal team six whatever you want to call them they put out a solicitation for a brand new survival kit and it was very intriguing because it was something that had not been well it it was kind of a new generation of survival kit and in that kit were a few things like you know handcuffed keys and handcuffed shims and things like that and that was very unique because that had not been seen uh as a military survival kit for a very long time in fact most of the survival kits from the military looked sort of like this you you know your vietnam era you know um line drawing you know typewriter written survival kits and that's you know that's something that the military had been working on for a very very long time and uh hadn't really sort of jumped past that cold war slash vietnam you know anywhere from the 60s to like the 80s style of survival kit they haven't jumped into a new uh era yet so um you know dev grew was looking for a new type of survival kit and that sort of that solicitation was written into a time magazine article and then quite a few different other entities jumped on board as well and they thought hey this is pretty cool because this has got a lot of new technology in it um so that exploded like i said and a lot of companies sort of created um their own versions and this is where we sort of see the spinoff and the creation of a civilian style survival kit slash seer kit type thing really because seer isn't in and of itself um is not necessarily a civilian uh civilian sort of program if you will and we we talk about this in part one so if you haven't already i forgot to mention check out part one and part two because that talks a lot about why we don't think necessary necessarily is it is a perfect fit for a civilian type setup but like i mentioned there are lots of survival kits on the market today and a lot of them include seer type components so that's where we sort of start to see the birth of this seer it's restraint escape style kits for the civilian sector now here's where they fall short a lot of these searches are based they are that they either have a plastic container or a metal like suma container like on the previous slide um they're they're going to have some kind of physical container all the little bits and bobs are put in this one container and that's your sear kit right well you know what if you know this is not really a sort of you know rabbit hole what if scenario this is a very likely scenario you're not going to have time to get to your kit if you're going to get you know snatched and grabbed off the street you're not going to have time to take those items out of your kit and layer them on your body somewhere you need to have that already pre-staged so we find that a lot of times people are going to go out there and they're going to spend you know 100 hundreds of dollars in some cases on these searches and they're just going to like put them in their pocket and go around like they're like they're perfectly fine they can escape any situation well that's not necessarily true um you know these seer kits are are great and it's better to have one than to not have one but let's be real when we're talking about the the adversaries we're going to be facing we're simply going to be you know grabbed off the street and we're not going to have chance to implement our escape plan right you know in the even worst case scenario uh what if you are uh you know taken and uh put in a a situation where there is no sort of westernized standard of human living right you know you're not going to have a lot of the tools you think you might have and you're going to have a lot more than you you know you didn't think you would have as well so the situation can be highly dependent on where you're at so like this image shows uh an isis prison in i believe syria at the time i think it was right there in the merv on the uh iraq syria border but uh the point is is that we sort of have a romanticized view a lot of times of what seer is going to look like and what a restraint escape situation is going to look like and it might not live up to your you know expectations so we need to to to take some considerations uh when it comes to actually the what the stuff we actually use you know is right so this is why we came up with this sort of system we have conventional survival kits right that are built for survival like solcoa is a company out there that's right at the cutting edge of if you're going to buy a pre-made survival kit you know soulcoa makes the best ones they're the ones who won the the solicitation for the original stuff and they've just been doing great stuff with all their civilian kits so if you buy one of their pre-made survival kits you'll be pretty you'll be sitting pretty right and then there's also dedicated sear kits that don't have quite so many survival components but they are dedicated for restraint escape and things like that well we wanted to kind of merge the two and and not necessarily create just one big kit that's both a survival kit and a sear kit we wanted to incorporate both sort of ideologies into the same thing uh the same system right we're not talking container based we're not talking like uh you know gear based we're talking a sort of survival escape system really is what was what we're looking at and that's how we're kind of approaching it so really um we're looking at not just one container but multiple containers like you know it's the layer throughout our body you know so that if we have you know all of these components together we'll be most prepared but if we can't necessarily take our survival kit with us but we can take our search kit we'll still be sort of okay you know we'll be able to make do and then we have a lot of specialized gear that not very many people are talking about when it comes to even seer kits a lot of people don't necessarily uh think about some of the things that we're going to talk about here in this which is probably going to be a very long video um but yeah that's why our main sort of system is we have a survival kit component um with with some seer tools in it so we have some bare bones stuff in it with that then we have a sort of seer capsule sort of mentality which has some survival tools in it as well so a little bit of each in each kit so that you can function both both ways and then we have sort of escape aids which are not in any container but they are layered on our person in various spots um you know concealed on our body somehow that we're and this is a daily thing so that we're not necessarily relying on the ability to layer these items uh from our circuit on our person you know if we get yanked out of bed in the middle of the night we'll still have stuff on us that's that that's the mentality with it and then finally of course the most important part by far is the knowledge part the knowledge part is most is the most important because not only is it the hardest to find but it's also the hardest to learn very few places and and and sort of government entities are going to talk about seer you know the seer courses that the military has are of course classified and even some of the tactics that are in those classes are classifieds and you know nobody can talk about them really a lot of the technology itself is classified as well so we don't exactly we're not exactly dealing with an open source um sort of system here you know we're not you the culture is not open source when it comes to seer even from seer from other countries like good luck finding any data whatsoever on russian seer courses and we know they exist um we know that you know from our professional atmosphere that they do exist we just you know in the civilian sector you're gonna you're not gonna find any information on them at all um so that's something to to consider is moving forward is that the knowledge part is the most important but it's also gonna be the most hard to find so when it comes to most seer kit contents you know like i said before we we don't necessarily think that seer is a good mentality from or seer as a concept isn't necessarily a good lens from which to view this in a civilian capacity it's not a perfect fit uh but the tools are so you're gonna see you can google you know buy search it or something like that and you're gonna find a bunch of different ones from a bunch of different companies and most of the time they're gonna have these four things inside them first of all you're going to have restraint escape tools next up you're going to have containment escape tools so once you get out of your hand restraints you're going to have to get out of your cell or container that you're in somehow and third up is barter slash trade components now a lot of times these this doesn't exist in a lot of commercial sear kits i can't think of any actually that have bartering tools in them but we'll talk about that in a minute and then lastly survival components things like ferro rods you know fire starters things like that you know those are are quite common to put in kits because they're quite cheap and very small to to put in there so that's what most sear kits have and it's kind of roughly the the categories from which we approach um the the sort of search it concept right so let's go through each of these categories and let's talk about some of the specific tools that we keep in our seer kit specifically now first up is restraint escape so handcuff keys like we mentioned before absolutely crucial there's two main kinds that we personally use there are many out there but these two are the are the really the two big ones for one on the left is the tiny inconspicuous handcuff key and the one on the right is the uh the delta key the one on the left uh the the tiny inconspicuous handcuff key really the only selling well there's two selling points for it one it has it has a clip on it and that allows it to be clipped into things like underwear t-shirts and the rolls of fabric all kinds of in your sock and you'll never know it that's a huge selling feature that not many handcuff keys have because the attachment point is really the crucial part you know you can have you know 50 different handcuff keys on you but if you have to sew them into your clothing every time that gets tedious and you're not going to do it unless you leave them permanently sewn in your clothes but then you have to buy an awful lot of handcuff keys whereas this one you could buy three or four of these and just clip them in your t-shirt clip them in your underwear as you go about the day and you know just continuously you know when you take your clothes off you know and change clothes just move the key over to this new set of garments and that works quite well and it's pretty cheap to do the other handcuff key is the delta key and for obvious reasons it's preferred in some areas because it works on a lot more cuffs than the than the plastic one however it's also metal now granted it is titanium so it is very metal detector resistant but it's not completely irresistible to metal detectors whereas a plastic key is so that's something to keep in mind we keep both we use one we have one or two of each in the little survival capsules that we use um but yeah it's just something to keep in mind is that if you're trying to go for a zero metal content that's you know the delta key is is kind of it's gonna have to go out and then uh another type of key which we have not seen anyone at all talk about is the um the the sort of uh and hua if that's how it's pronounced anhua cuffs from oscar oscar delta they met oscar delta is i believe a british company that makes these keys and these keys are the only ones on the market that work for the chinese police handcuffs now we had of course planned to show these handcuffs in you know part three but that's going to have to come later so we'll show you how these handcuffs work specifically but the short version is you can't use a normal american handcuff key on them you have to use this tube-like thing because the key is actually has to be a try hollow triangle shape now so these uh handcuffs are obviously the only thing on the market that work for these handcuffs so you're if you're in you know southeast asia most southeast asian nations use these handcuffs and a lot of middle eastern nations use these handcuffs as well and you cannot shim them the only way to get out of them is using this type of key now that being said you know oscar delta is is doing a great thing by offering this the only company that offers it so far but keep in mind is that their keys aren't quite perfect so if um as you can see here on this image the key on the left has been used one time and the key on the right in this image has been used not at all as you can see the one on the left is rounded out quite significantly and that's because the turning force the torque needed to to actually open these chinese police handcuffs is quite significant it is double or triple the amount of effort required to turn the key on an american style set of handcuffs and that's important because the key is made out of copper this uh delta uh you know oscar delta and hua key is made out of copper and it's basically a one time use tool and in some cases like these two keys here that i have that i'm showing you right now they didn't ever open the handcuffs so as you can see on the image on the right where the three keys there on the on the coin the one on the left we took a pair of pliers and bent it into more of a triangle shape and those work fine uh those work a lot better than you know just crimping it just a little bit into more of a triangle permanent triangle shape uh that works out quite well on these chinese police handcuffs so if you buy these and put them in your kit just recognize that you're going to have to do that because these keys as they come from oscar delta some of them work some of them don't some of them work flawlessly on certain chinese handcuffs but the as you know as we were going to talk about in the video on about these specific handcuffs their machining tolerances vary widely like some of these handcuffs like we have a pair of these handcuffs that the key that comes with the handcuffs cannot open like that's how bad these are manufactured and so if you're trying to cover the most tolerances the the most different kinds of of these chinese police handcuffs you're going to have to adapt your keys to do that so that's just kind of an aside you know we wanted to talk about this in a different video of course but that's going to come out a little bit later but yeah a a dedicated key for chinese police handcuffs is crucial if you spend a lot of time in those areas not so much a concern for america but these are used widely around the world and then up next is of course the um the the ubiquitous handcuff key shim now this is just an example one that we have sort of it's the key style handcuffed shim where it's got a little bit of a little bit of a grip to it and we bent it so that it can fit in a kit a little bit better you know you can buy these you can use these you can use the split paul kind of the russian kind depending on where you were taught um they uh those work as well actually those are the ones i use in my own personal kit but this is just an example of a handcuff shim or our hank of shims are quite crucial especially if you are you know sort of uh using up against a blue box type system it's really the only thing that's going to work you know you know if you can take advantage of the fact that nobody can you know double lock the cuffs right so uh take a look at um parts one and two for talking about more about shims but yeah shims go in the kit um also um extra kevlar cordage and i have this as an example a size reference next to this sort of crushed up dollar bill and kevlar cordage is a great escape tool now you can put this in your kit you can also sew it into your clothing very loosely so that you could just pull it out like i've got it on a couple of pairs of pants i've just got it you know wrapped around the inside of the waistband so that i can reach around behind and pull it out from inside the pants it's just like pulling a you know the thread loose on a sweater but instead of pulling the pants loose it pulls the kevlar cord out so that's a good way to do that as well if you didn't want to store it in the kit and then up next is something that not a whole lot of people well a lot of people talk about the normal ceramic razor blades but you can also buy ceramic razor blades are becoming very very commercially popular and this company called slice makes like holiday gift wrapping you know cutting tools and things like they're a craft company and they make a great escape innovation tool which is basically their version of an x-acto knife but it's all plastic now it must be noted that on the inside of where this razor blade is held in it's held in by a metal spring but you can you can pull that out quite easily and make this entirely plastic and this is great because a lot of people are used to buying these little six dollar ceramic razor blades with little hole in them and things like that and those are those are good there's work but why not have why not have a tool with a handle on it because a tool with a handle on it uh can fit inside the small survival capsule we're going to talk about in a minute and it it greatly greatly expands your capability so that's something to keep in mind and it can also function as an improvised improvised defensive tool if need be has a cap on it and things like that so that is a great tool to use if you're in if you're looking to get into it it's expensive it's quite expensive the razer blades are roughly double what uh normal razor blades normal ceramic razor blades cost um and i think the whole tool itself is like gosh i hate to quote a price on film that's going to change let's say you get anywhere from 15 to 30 bucks one of these um razor blade tool x-acto knife things and it comes with a couple of blades uh so depending on where you get it from so yeah that's that's something to to look into ceramic razor blades non-metallic absolutely uh crucial for a kit like this then up next are lock picks now these are the absolute smallest lock picks that i would consider using and these are the the bogota i think nano i think that's what they're called we have a few the minis the micros or whatever they're called and we have all different sizes of these bogotas they're expensive they're very expensive uh tools but they are titanium they're low they're they're not made of a ferrous metal which means they're harder harder to detect with a metal detector once again um and so yeah that's why they go in our kit because these are the smallest ones that we can use um physically right there are smaller ones out there smaller lock picks but they are made of steel which is you know quite magnetic and very easily detectable via a metal detector and they also don't quite have the capabilities these have so um you know this is about as small as we go with with the lock picks and they fit easily on the survival type capsule and then up next is something that not very many people talk about because it's kind of expensive is an escape saw now this particular escape saw i think we got from shomer tech but there's now a couple of different brands out there um and they we put the price here on the screen as 20 bucks because that's i think what the msrp is but we got this one for eight dollars um i can't remember from where i think it was shimmer tech but i'm not entirely certain and we got a few of these and this saw is like you you would you don't quite understand how sharp it is until you get it and i've never seen a saw like this before not even like a small like jeweler's little saw this kind of saw is amazing it will cut through everything so this saw is worth way more than its weight in gold and i would highly recommend getting one of these little escape saws like this and also it functions as a handcuff shim it's the right size to work as that and it's long so it will work on a lot of those uh handcuffs that like we showed before those rigid cuffs where it has a re you need a really long shim to get in there and bypass those locking poles this one will work it will work quite well in fact and the saw blade doesn't get in the way when it's used as a handcuff shim so this is one of those tools where it's like you're hesitant to buy it because it's like ah that's kind of expensive for such you know tiny little saw there's better saw blades out there right um but we pulled the trigger on it we bought it and we bought a few of these and they have been amazing i would not hesitate to buy uh quite a few more of these so that's the so you and this saw blade goes by a few different names [Music] but you can generally just google escape saw and you'll find it it's a very small little saw blade like that then up next are a couple of more you know more like containment escape tools like for padlocks so we've got a quick stick and an easy decoder once again they're bent to sort of fit the round container you can leave these in or you can take them out i personally don't rely on these i take them out because they're um they're steel spring steel and it i'm trying to get i personally my personal one is trying to be as as as have as little magnetic signature as possible and these really don't grant me a whole a whole heck of a lot of capability considering i have a saw blade i have you know lock picks themselves things like that i can get i can fashion a way to get through a padlock um without using this type of tool so put them in if you want i think a few guys have them in theirs here but yeah that's something to consider these are fairly common component in a lot of search kits and then up next is barter slash trade items now this is one where we kind of want to explain what we're talking about here because a lot of people get bent out of shape when it comes to talking barter goods now i will admit that bartering in a stereotype scenario is probably not a good idea it's not a super great thing um it usually most seer doctrine like anybody who's been through a normal seer course will tell you yeah bartering is it that went out of the window you know back in the 50s right we don't barter anymore we avoid civilians as much as possible and because usually a civilian population means we're going to get turned in you know the united states military learned that very well from vietnam and subsequent conflicts uh throughout the middle east is that basically yeah you're not going to have a population that is on your side this isn't world war ii anymore the world has changed quite significantly now that being said we also have to remember though that in the civilian sector we might have that option you know we are not you know like downed aviators you know where most seer courses are you know um meant to sort of portray we're civilians right we're in our own communities so bartering might be an option if nothing else we're talking about like bribing guards and things like that and that might be a better option and gold is very very small it's very lightweight if you keep a gram or two on you um and it it's relatively cheap for what you can get out of it see these little one gram bars are very very small you can see how they fit there but two of them fit on a quarter and you can fit these very easily pretty much anywhere and they have a lot of value so you can use them to easily trade you know the the uses for these are quite literally endless in a civilian sphere type scenario not so much useful in a conventional military sense but we do have to remember the origins right these did exist in the military sort of history right there were such things as barter kits as you can see here on the slide you know aviators throughout the pacific and in some parts of the european theaters mostly the pacific theaters as far as we know but comment below if you know where these were used more often these barter kits are sort of a lesser known part of history where they are a kit of of valuable things that could be used with a native population to help get a downed aviator to back to american friendly lines right so this one on the right here contains a very nice mechanical watch with a little watch band you know watches aren't typically that hugely valuable to you know westernized society but to you know a sort of pacific islander culture back in the 40s they you know a very you know um very tribal like culture a timepiece might have a lot more value than a gold coin would um you know likewise a lot of these you know small shiny baubles and things like that going back to the you know quasi-offensive you know era of of um you know colonists you know trading with you know native americans and things like that they weren't trading things that had particular value um to the to the you know the westerners but to the natives they had great value so things like that you know a little copper or uh you know so you know very low carrot uh gold um very ill-fitting uh pressed you know rings things like that might have great value and that's where sort of where we're coming from now in a modern day society we of course are going to use these little gram pieces little gram bars of gold because they're easier to carry and you know things like that but you know just keep in mind is it bartering while it has come out of the the doctrine for most of um you know american societies it might be willing to put in it might be worth putting in your circuit um just on your you know out of your own considerations so um to think about that is something to think about you don't have to do any of the stuff we're saying of course but it's you know a lot of people um put down bartering or a lot of people of course overestimate the power of borrowing like they're going to be able to walk up to a guard and say i'd like to be led out of jail please here's one one gram of gold like no it's not going to work like that but in a situation where you might have the opportunity to barter you want to have something to barter with so that's why we include gold now another barter tool that we use is uh diamonds now diamonds historically have been quite bad for currency they have very little resale value they they cannot be divided easily like gold can and they are very very uh different every single diamond is different which means that it basically checks all them uh you know checks all the boxes for not becoming a currency so diamonds are not a great shtf's currency it would not be a good idea just stockpile diamonds or anything like that now that being said we do include one diamond one little .23 carat diamond in these kits because as you see look how small it is it is so small and it cost us around 250 bucks to buy it from a certified american vendor now if you've ever been to a foreign country like afghanistan and you try to buy some of the jewelry that's you know on base or um you know come this stuff that comes through the kyber pass and stuff like that you can get non-certified almost certainly illegal diamonds for a lot cheaper and um that would probably be you know an option for some people if you're not too concerned about you know u.s laws you know if obviously if you're in the u.s you have to obey us laws and those kinds of diamonds are illegal but if you're in afghanistan if you're in a country that doesn't necessarily care about the diamond trade that might be an option for you and you can get it for a lot cheaper you buy a two carat diamond for like what 50 bucks or something like that you know off some kid in a foreign country and it'll be a perfectly fine you know perfectly fine diamond of course it's you know morally questionable but you know that's just how the diamond trade works in other countries but we might have a future video talking about that kind of stuff but yeah sorry we're going to leave it kind of vague for now but the point is is that diamonds can serve as a last currency and that's because a lot of like i mentioned a lot of terror groups use diamonds to finance their terrorism to this day even though they're not a good currency they don't necessarily have a whole lot of resale value they're very hard to tell what value they have um you'd need a very special you'd have to know what you're looking at to tell how valuable a diamond is and even then it you know it might mean something to some you could have two you know diamond uh you know you could have two jewelers look at the same diamond and give you a different price for it so that's not admit that's you know basically rules it out as a currency unless you're dealing with like a terror group or something so if you're held you know if you're held captive by a terror group or if you've you know you've gotta uh you know pay your way through you know a dirty guard or some kind of border checkpoint in a foreign nation which we may or may not have had to do many times in the past um diamonds work that ones work quite well so keeping one around you see how small it is it doesn't hurt anything it takes up no space in your kit and if you can do that you know it would not be a bad thing to do and then moving on to a more conventional barter thing you can just keep cash on you like um we have this uh um dollar bill here which is a 50 bill a 50 american dollar bill and then we also have a 50 euro note that we can cram up and uh shove in um our kit so that works out quite well um you can use you know spend money no matter where so euros obviously europe you're not going to find any place in the united states it takes euros but that's so that's why we have the american dollar bill and the american dollar bill functions in a lot of it works in most countries on earth i haven't i don't think i've ever been to a country that did not accept american dollars at some place now a lot of places of course within europe don't accept american dollars in the countries but you can always find some place that does i haven't been to anywhere where you have to use america you have to use the local currency with the exception of places like war zones where um the local population does not want to get caught with american currency because um that mean that they might get labeled as a collaborator with americans right so like in a lot of places in you know iraq and syria you're not going to find you're going to find that the locals don't want to take american cash they want to take their local currency or something else in trade because they don't want to get caught with the american dollar bills at least that's the way it was a you know a few years ago but yeah keeping cash on you in your little survival cat capsule is very very important then up next is sort of the sort of survival components and the first one up is this little thumbtack compass compasses like this are quite amazing i think the very first uh first time that we heard about this was a little nato 40 millimeter compass a little dry cell compass that i think they're still made nowadays but they work quite well these are i think thumbtack they're labeled as thumbtack compasses from county comm it's the only place i've been able to find them but they are very very small as you can see by how small it is compared to that quarter and they fit very well inside the lid of the survival capsules or uh if you don't want to glue them to the inside of the lid uh you can just stick them in there they also fit very well in little you know pico containers as we'll talk about in a minute um but yeah these these compasses work quite well i will note though that somehow or another we've got like i don't know 15 or 20 of these laying around and so at some point in time uh they become demagnetized now some of this only happens with a with a couple of the ones we have like they they no longer point north and i don't know how or why but it's just kind of a reminder that if you're dealing with something this small and it's a dry cell you might want to might want to keep checking it every now and then to make sure that it actually does in fact point north and you haven't de-magnetized it in some way because the needle is so small um and you know so yeah that's something to keep in mind and then up next this is something that we know we don't really see a whole lot of people talking about but water treatment tablets in a survival capsule um and this is something that you like our personal experience sort of came out and i'll show you an image and this image was from nepal when we were there a while ago and this image is taken from about 300 kilometers from the nearest town so this road is the only part of the road that goes through this part of the country it's down um a little bit further south than uh kathmandu uh the main the capital there and it's in the middle of nowhere um quite literally there is nothing uh except for this road um there's no humans there's no villages there's there's nothing in this particular part of the country for you know a couple hundred kilometers around and there's garbage everywhere there is trash everywhere you would be surprised um at how much garbage is in places around the world that like where no humans should be or go like i remember going to um going to indonesia and just going to the beaches there and just walking the beaches and you cannot take a single step without stepping on some plastic garbage so suffice it to say the world today in is polluted it's polluted as heck and it is not a um place that i want to drink water from you know this is not the kind of thing where you can go back and um look at you know survival guides and survival manuals from like 50 years ago and say like oh you know you can drink water that's clean coming out of a mountain or things like that you know that's really it's really going to be hard to find a spot of water on planet earth that has not been contaminated by human beings even in some of the most remote areas on the planet so that's why we want to carry water treatment because water treatment tablets can prevent you from getting very very sick and if you're on the run and you get some kind of thing like giardia or you know crypto or something like that uh you could quite literally be dead within a couple of days um if nothing else you're gonna be sapped of all energy uh within within 24 hours and that's not good and if you're in some kind of you know escape and evasion scenario right so that's why we talk about water treatment tablets and we keep them on us no matter what now these are the um uh potable aqua tablets no they're the mic they cated in micro pure tablets there are some other ones called from israel card called uh tahar mayem i think is how you say it you'll notice the packaging has you know hebrew lettering all over it when you google like water purification tablets they are a lot smaller and they might fit in these survival caps a little bit more but these were micro pure tablets that we had um and we just you know shoved them in there because it took up a little bit extra space and prevented the the kit from rattling so much so that that's why we have those in our kit all right and up next is something that i don't i haven't seen anybody talk about at all and this is a micro sd card now this is one of those things where we're gonna have to be kind of cryptic again about why we have it um but we we always all of us here um separately and independently carry a micro sd card and you know sometimes multiple ones um and on that micro sd card we have three partitions so the first partition is unencrypted it is just a normal you plug it into a usb adapter plug it into a computer you can read it normally and that thing in that that partition has our identity documents you know scans of passports drivers licenses things like that visas you know entry paperwork um [Music] if you're traveling in a country that requires it a lot of times you know vaccine paperwork things like that medical records if you know if we get injured and you know we're unconscious somebody finds this you know capsule on our person they plug in this micro sd card they can get our medical records and things like that if they need them um we also have on their sort of information arc you know like we've mentioned before um sort of like a you know like a noah's ark of information you know information that's likely to be banned so a couple hundred survival manuals you know all kinds of things that are likely to not be available in a lot of places so we keep that you know on the unencrypted part because so it's easier to get to so on part two i'm afraid we're gonna have to be you know even more cryptic about that um part two is gonna also be encrypted and it is going to have a negotiating tool a small bit of information that we can give people the password to we could tell them the password to allow them to install the encryption software and decrypt partition 2 and that can serve to verify our identity if we needed to we don't want that unencrypted because we want people to have to interact with us at some point in time so so we get picked up for something and we need to verify our authenticity but we can't we don't want to have it on an unencrypted drive we could physically tell our captors slash interrogators right okay open partition 2 on the hard drive here's the password for it that should verify our identity or it could be used to barter so we could say hey this is the information we have if you want to talk about negotiating for our freedom we can do that too and then partition three is essentially our insurance policy it is um another partition where we can have a whole host of information that might be valuable to any government agency on earth and um if you know part two partition two can serve to verify the authenticity and verify who we are verify that we do have the access to the information that we do have and part three is the um is the full on sort of information that can be used to ensure our freedom or if nothing else it can be used to um ensure our our authenticity right so uh that's that's sort of what we keep on the micro sd cards hopefully people out there who are in the know who might need this sort of setup will recognize what we're talking about because every analyst out there has an insurance policy once you've seen enough stuff out there to make sure that you you know a lot of times intel analysts and people not necessarily analysts this is more of an ops thing but people who get involved in special programs or things like that oftentimes realize that in order to make it home in one piece they need some kind of insurance policy to make sure that their government comes and gets them and doesn't just leave you know drop them like third period french right so you know incidents have happened over time and um you know i'm just going to leave it at that so microsd cards uh are very um very very important especially when it comes to information and then sort of along those lines is a more thing that we can talk a little bit more freely about is is a blood now this is something that is more of a governance and government thing only but you can make your own and essentially a bloodshed you can read about it on your own it's fascinating to read the history of these but essentially what it is is a document it's a document that has one statement on it or a series of statements and it is written in most languages on earth most common languages certainly the language is in a specific area so if you're operating in say like southeast asia every language spoken in southeast asia will be on this bloodshed and essentially it's a document that says hey i'm an american i'm in trouble uh if you help me if you help me my government will pay you a certain dollar amount and um yeah hell you know help me get back here take this take you know rip off a corner of the document that's your receipt essentially that you helped me and you can go to the embassy and claim your reward right um these were very popular in world war ii they came out they arose actually out of the very first bloodshed i believe was uh from a balloonist in france from like the 17th century or 18th century or something like that don't quote me on that but this go this concept of a bloodshed goes back hundreds of years quite a long way really to the very first time you know the very first air travel with balloons is how far back they go and they're still used today although nowadays they look more like this this is what bloodsheds look like in today's modern military they're mostly the same piece of paper you know durable tyvek paper um but they are uh put in belts um so they call they're called blood belts nowadays now of course we can't show what one like looks like for real because you know there aren't any pictures of that on the internet and they are heavily serialized um so you you sign these out these are controlled items you sign these out just in the military when you're issued one you sign these out just like you signed up for night vision goggles or weapon uh catalog because it has currency value each corner of that document is worth ten thousand dollars i think is the going rate um so if that gets into the wrong hands you could potentially be paying terrorists up to forty thousand dollars of hard american dollars no questions asked so that's why these are kind of a sort of a not really a taboo item to talk about it's just nobody really knows about them so if you wanted to make your own um you can i would advise doing this actually it'd be quite good quite good to have you know put it on some type of paper print it out on some really durable you know paper right in the ring pipe or something like that and you just keep it around um because that's a really good part of a survival kit you know so it's a sort of bloodshed now obviously you can't really make one that is you know valuable you know uh has value to it like you know tear this corner off and it's worth ten thousand dollars that would be kind of not really doable but you can write on a piece of paper in a bunch of different languages as you know a phrase like please help me get back to the nearest you know american embassy or something like that and that would be good you know that's what we do a lot of times um so yeah bloodsheds are very very useful and then so the next concept is switching gears quite quite radically here um this is the next concept that we wanted to talk about because it has more of a pop culture reference than anything and uh so this is also by the way the part where you know we're going to be talking about some kind of adult topics so if you've got you know kids around listening to this you might want to hit pause for a second or skip past it um not to say you know we're you know going to get particularly vulgar it's just you know this type of stuff is not quite pleasant or for mixed company and this is the idea of the plan d evasion plan of you know evasion or plan simply and this comes from a movie because people remember movies more than they remember us classified documents right this comes from a movie called papillon steve mcqueen movie from you know way back in the day oh really good movie they did a remake of it here recently but the original is of course always always better but there's one particular scene right at the beginning of the movie where steve mcqueen's character is he's got this little capsule in his hand and for those of you who don't know you know without spoiling the content of the movie the movie is about a guy who is sent to um devil's island um and he is basically the worst prison in the world and for a crime he didn't commit of course right and it's it's about documenting his journey to escape and things like that so that's the plot of the movie if you haven't seen it before but suffice it to say very harsh conditions right and the only possessions he has in his possession are in this little capsule and the movie sort of explains it to try to explain to a civilian uh audience what is exactly going on because it's a key part of the movie and um steve mcqueen his character is kind of an expositional moment within the movie he's being observed by a fellow inmate and a hammock on board the the transport ship and he's observed um putting money in this little survival capsule right and he and he remarks you know as he's putting the money into the capsule um he makes our mark of you know oh you know the things we have to do you know for survival you know i'm shoving things up one's uh rear end right so it's a sort of rectal capsule um that he keeps money in and as most people know this is very much a thing in u.s prisons today so um skipping out of the fantasy land because we don't want to ever do anything survival related you know based on a movie right this actually is a real thing in fact this is an example a 3d model of a of the oss the office of strategic services developed this what they quite literally called a rectal tool kit and it is a metal capsule that has all bunch of these little tools and stuff in it for escaping and evading and a little handle for all these tools as well and uh it's quite big if you look at the look at how big the capsule is it's quite significantly quite quite large in fact much larger than i think anyone would would want to put it delicately but it's also press fit together there's no threads in it at all it's press fit together and it's meant to you know go right up inside a person and uh for retrieval later so that you could pass a strip search and so that if you're in captivity you could still have access to some tools now the uh the the british our friends from across the pond are not to be outdone they have their own version as well this is a more more modern version from our friends over at mi6 they created one as well and this is the only photo we could find of one and it is we don't know how big it is um but as you can see the knurled surface there has got to be sort of painful um you know going in and coming out from its hiding place um but yeah so this is a this is a real thing this is not something that that's just you know in movies or whatnot and then we also have to remember the prison example everyone knows about the you know the old um to put it crudely the prison pocket right that everybody uh knows about so this is the modern day version this is a very mysterious product that appeared on schumer tech's website a few years ago and it's um it has a quite obvious usage now as you can see one is quite tapered there's no hard surfaces anywhere on it there's no you know jagged surfaces and it looks like it has one very specific use now the shimmer tech capsule is very very interesting because it sort of unscrews in the middle right there it has an o-ring on it so it's waterproof um so the contents inside don't get soiled and sometimes you'll find these being sold with a packet of lubricating jelly right there so there's really only one one possible usage for this capsule and the capsule itself is interesting because it's made out of magnesium some additive normal metal it's made out of magnesium so that if you had a ceramic razor blade on the inside of that capsule you could shave the capsule itself is a fire starting tool which is interesting um it's a great concept there are a few you know a few cons to it though um but yeah the shimmer tech capsule is quite interesting now one thing that we we must talk about is uh this is the you know like i mentioned the the very crude term the you know prison pocket right um this is something that modern day corrections is very much prepared for people have been shoving things you know up the rear end for quite literally forever as long as prisons have been around so they've gotten quite good at detecting that sort of stuff now this is where you know sort of non-magnetic stuff comes into this is the boss too this is what most county what pretty much every christmas department in the world or at least in the united states in europe they have these and these are designed to detect all kinds of metal inside a person ri

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so today we've got the launch of a new mini series and uh today we're going to kick that off with the first part of that mini series so this is kind of a a branch off on on the topic uh the american troubles that we've talked about a couple of times before we've had a podcast on it a youtube video on this subject and now we're going to be talking about part three which will branch off into its own series on escape and concealment so as everyone knows usually we like to start off with the why or the mentality or philosophy behind why we're trying to talk about this topic but this time around we're going to start off with a disclaimer so of course we have to have this kind of disclaimer on this topic because this is kind of a little bit more gray area than we have talked about before so let me just go ahead and read this out so this information is provided only for legal lawful use the ester general project cannot be held liable for any misuse of this information currently the concept of sharing knowledge is a constitutionally protected right and as such no further reason is needed to explain why we are sharing this information in short the first amendment talks about covers our ability to talk about this information there's no such thing as protected information uh the only thing that kind of comes close to this is the concept of classified information but once again nothing in this series will be classified none of this information will be proprietary and none of this information will be derived from any federal state or governmental force this is all just our own private knowledge and experience gained over years of of dealing with this stuff in the field so despite the fact that we have the disclaimer we have to have another one the disclaimer to the disclaimer essentially what we mean is don't be stupid don't break laws our constitutionally protected rights are infringed on every day by various groups agencies and entities so we fully expect that certain entities will attempt to stop us from sharing this information but if they do they're going to have to take down every other lock sport enthusiast in the us lock picking is a hobby is very large in the united states and around the world to be honest and there really aren't that many laws that cover it especially what we're going to talk about today which is illegal restraints so i know that's kind of boring i know that people really don't like when we have to do disclaimers but honestly to ensure the survivability of this video series we have to kind of put this disclaimer in there to say that look this is for illegal restraints i will caveat that and say that that this is the third time we have filmed this we have 37 slides of the why behind this sort of project but we decided not really to to go down that road and just simply say look it's all right to talk about this stuff so we're going to talk about it because we think it's information that people need to know and we're just going to leave it at that now when we talk about the concept of restraint escape we really jump to the only field and the only doctrine and the only subject area in the world that really talks about this sort of thing from a practical standpoint sure as we mentioned the whole lock sport entity is is great and and the whole lock lock-picking hobby is great um but to be honest that that hobby doesn't really encompass too many um people talking about restraint escape and that's uh that's sort of what we're kind of gearing towards today which is restraint escape really the only thing that talks about you know someone's got you locked up be it a terrorist or a foreign government or something like that someone's got you locked up and get you tied down how do you get out of that and get back home well there's one field of study that is specifically meant for that and that seer the survival evasion resistance and escape doctrine from the us military um all branches have some version of this there's all different kinds of courses from the you know the you know two hour long uh online course that everybody has to take before they deploy to the actual like you know several day long you know like the week-long course uh that actually puts a lot of this stuff into practice now there are also a lot of people out there who talk about restraint escape and um they build like survival kits like sear kits like google the term sear kit and you will find a lot of companies out there a lot of small companies out there that are building these surrogates with all kinds of little goodies inside them to help get you out of an illegal restraint situation now that's great and we think that a lot of these you know private companies doing this sort of thing they you know this technology would not be available to civilians were not for private civilian companies coming up with this stuff but we also have to remember that seer as a concept isn't quite the same as escaping from a restraint situation as a civilian so let's talk about that for a little bit and i know a pretty text heavy slide but in short cyr assumes a lot of factors that are not not exactly applicable to civilians so i'll just go down the list here first of all you know sear assumes that a nation state will use every possible resource to recover a single person so in other words in the concept of seer the whole overarching dark doctrine is there will be a nation helping you um we're you know an entire military group an entire military division an entire command has been set up specifically for recovering personnel right we have satellites in space that are meant specifically for helping our you know downed aviators lost troops captured capture soldiers and and whatnot get back to civilian or get back to you know their own military's lines civilians don't have this civilians have zero resources the only resources a civilian has when it comes to escaping an illegal restraint situation is yourself right there is no team coming to get you um usually there's going to be no like nation state that's going to try to you know help you escape from these situations uh and sort of to go along with that uh seer the you know military doctrine allows for personnel to have classified military gear there are whole radios out there like the the c-cell radio is the newest one i think and other rfid tags and tracking devices and things sewn into clothing and stuff like that that the military and service members can have access to which can aid in recovery whereas civilians don't have this the civilian civilian infrastructure you know does not have the ability to classify technology from the government whereas the government can of course classify things from us so there's no such thing as owning a secret technology right the government is going to know about it one way or another another factor is that seer is a doctrine it is very heavy on assuming the capability of an aerial recovery i.e a helicopter coming to get you civilians almost never have this capability i'm sure it's possible but you know there's it's just so remote of a chance it's not even worth considering in your plan also sort of along those lines is seer as a doctrine assumes a vastly superiori superior firepower capability during recovery right so when we think of syria in the military we kind of maybe have this over romanticized viewpoint of like you know an owen wilson behind enemy line situation where the you know good guys swoop in with you know five or six helicopters and just you know lay waste to all the enemy bad guys where the you know good guy makes a jump to recovery right well civilians don't have this capability at all you know granted you know that's not exactly a realistic example but during you know a hostage recovery or during it you know some kind of you know hostage rescue team sort of incident there's they're going to be vastly out gunning the captors usually in that situation civilians can't begin to compete there's no way that civilians now in the year 2020 can outgun the government uh or or any other sort of source right civilians can barely outgun each other right as we keep finding out in the news but so if you're assuming that your rescuers are going to be able to outgun your you know captors well that's not going to happen even if it's you know like a terror cell or something another thing that people tend to tend to ignore is the criminality aspect to this so in seer if you know no criminal activity or mistakes to be charged for afterwards basically if you are in or if you are a lawfully sort of uh captured combatant in a foreign nation you know serving under you know your nation's military and you escape from that situation and you kill a guard during the escape well guess what your host nation is not going to kill you it's not going to um charge you for killing that guard right your your own nation now the nation you escaped from might but the uh your own country is not going to charge you for murder for killing a guard during an escape good luck doing that in the united states even if it's in a sort of self-defense situation even if you're being held against your will by another civilian guess what you're probably going to get some kind of charge against you the whole idea nowadays in 2020 the whole idea the whole concept the whole ideology of self-defense is up for debate right so especially from you know everybody from you know governmental agencies to uh the general public right everybody is trying to debate what this what this term self-defense really means so we don't have that luxury of you know civilians of being able to escape from a situation and causing harm to somebody else to do so another uh situation is that uh civilian or military forces have the ability for a diplomatic recovery civilians don't have that luxury uh you know no amount of negotiating with a a a domestic terrorist no amount of negotiating with say a rogue governmental agency is going to result in your release once any kind of sort of rogue governmental agency or or group gets their hands on you your there's no way they're going to let you up also there's no there will be no oversight by agency such as the red cross i mean think about from the normal criminal aspect how many times does the international red cross come in and inspect our you know disaster camps like you know after a hurricane well they don't how many times does the red cross go into canada and uh check out their sort of their uh quarantine camps right not really that many you know we can't find any documentation uh suggesting that's ever happened another aspect of you know formal cr doctrine is that it focuses on avoiding urban centers and avoiding pretty much all contact civilians basically you read any seer sort of handbook from sort of the 1970s when the concept of sir was created until today the whole chapter is basically going to say look you know avoid urban areas because if you come in contact with civilians they're probably going to turn you in or it is going to be a very rare situation that you're going to come across another human being in a serious situation and it's going to work out in your favor in the civilian sector we don't have that option usually if there's going to be a seer type of situation you know most most people in america live in or near a heavily urbanized area you know we don't have the luxury of being able to walk for for um you know tens and and you know tens and dozens of miles without seeing a road right in certain areas of the nation certainly you can like out in the midwest now you know pacific northwest and places like that you can walk for days and not see another road or another sign of a human being but on the east coast where we're located just as a concern for us personally you can't walk you know five or six miles in any direction without walking across three or four roads so even the most remote areas of the united states are having this impact come in and you know syria kind of it kind of doesn't really provide any information for that also and lastly and most importantly by far is the concept that seer as a formal doctrine relies on the ability to escape and evade back to friendly territory seer assumes you are in a hostile area and you can cross a line and be suddenly behind friendly lines right in the civilian sector in the united states we don't have anywhere else to go civilians simply don't have anywhere else to defect to there is despite all the all of the shortcomings in the united states right now there is nowhere else to defect to the united states is still the freest and it's really not that free to be honest as we all really know by now um you know civilians are going to have to make the choice of do i need to escape from my home right you're not talking about someone's you know having to eject over hostile nation halfway around the world and you know having that hope factor of driving themselves to get home well guess what civilians are home what do they do now right so this is kind of a lot of things to think about when it comes to seer and you know despite all of this sort of bad stuff that we've just talked about seer is not a perfect solution but the overarching doctrine you know might not be a good solution to the problems we face but the individual skills are sound really the only factor that that kind of changes with sierra for the civilian sector is that for civilians everything is going to be significantly more difficult require much more preparation require much more money at practice and gear so uh basically it's just going to be that you know sear is going to be a lot harder for civilians to do in or or even for service members to do while conus you know that's going to be that's going to be very hard to do because the sierra jogstream is is focused around a hostile nation and getting back to friendly lines or getting back to a point where you can be extracted well in the civilian sector who's going to extract us and where we're going to go right so these are just some things to think about that when we talk about this sort of seer stuff when you see all these seer kits online is it like yeah i mean that's all well and good essentially it's just restraint escape when we're talking about this stuff because you know where are you going to go right so before we get into restraint escape here's a few other things to think about that not a whole lot of people are thinking about right now when they talk about seer first one is money like i mentioned before if you're ever in a situation where you find yourself uh needing to use your seer skills conus you're going to need a lot of money because the money and money and funds funding is going to get you uh 99 of the way right you're also going to need a long-term support network you know it's not like we can evade for a couple weeks at the max until we can get back to a friendly or even a neutral nation in the united states we might have to wait months before any kind of thing calms down you know we're also going to have to need if we have to use these skills conus is the ability to leave everything behind you might not be able to return home you know if you find yourself sort of imprisoned in your house right and you need to escape or else something bad's going to happen to you right you also have to have the ability to have really no family or friends or the ability to bring them with you and that's a huge clincher for a lot of people you know another thing you're going to need is a new identity the the thing is is that like look you cannot be a person in you know really most nations without an extensive identity not just some cheap you know plastic fake id you know fake driver's license that high schoolers you used back in the day right we're talking about an entire identity an entirely new person new social security number new a passport new driver's license a a a career a whole set of really a whole life right and that's going to be impossible for 99.999 of everybody out there the people that can afford it probably not going to be watching this video so that's just something to keep in mind as well and then lastly which is kind of something that we're very really hesitant to talk about is the legality of all of this stuff right if you find yourself in a situation where you are going to have to escape from a situation what would a jury think and we we must remember that at the how do i put this at the at the risk of going off the deep end and sort of losing credibility immediately we have to remember that history matters right and if we look back over history we must remember that the things that human beings have done to each other the atrocities on a mass scale right pretty much every every example of genocides over time every example of totalitarianism authoritarianism basically the worst parts of every dystopian fiction novel you could possibly imagine those scenarios coming true if you know when they have come true in the past guess what that's all been legal right everything that happened during you know in in germany and poland during world war ii that was all legal under the german law because they made it so everything that was done in rwanda during the genocide there in the 90s guess what that was also all legal you know same thing with some of the crimes going on you know right now in belarus with um uh you know uh president lukashenko uh locking down and you know torturing his own civilians and things like that you know guess what it's legal because he's a dictator he's declared himself to be so so we must remember that if you're going to be using these skills you're probably going to be breaking the law and that's where we kind of get into a very gray area and that's why not a whole lot of people out there are talking about what we're about to talk about normally what people talk about is just simple restraint escape like duct tape zip ties handcuffs you know your basic handcuffs right that's pretty much all they leave it at because that's pretty much you know they don't want to offend anybody or get on anybody's radar screen by talking about something more serious but we think and this is the whole crux of this sort of video series is that like look talking about how to escape from duct tape is is drastically under representative of the skills the situations the the tools and the the circumstances that are out there in the world today right it's not like we're talking about you know a 1970s airline hijacking where they just duct tape everybody on board you know those days are gone these tools that we're going to be talking about today all of these tools were purchased by us using civilian credentials which is to say an email address and you know paypal or a credit card or something and they're all shipped right to our house none of the things we bought today and most importantly none of the knowledge that we've learned today is any remotely controlled so if we can buy it bad guys can buy it too and that's why we wanted to talk about this is because not a whole lot of people are talking about some of these more extensive restraint type systems so without further ado let's go talk let's start talking about illegal restraint escape and some of the themes and things we need to think about when preparing for this kind of situation so the themes that we're going to talk about today there are really four main points one is that preparation is crucial now some of these restraints we're going to be talking about are pretty much impossible to get out of unless you have prepared for prepared for them ahead of time most of these are like that some of these you can get out of them a few different ways but mostly if you don't prepare ahead of time you're not going to be able to get out of any of this stuff so preparation is crucial right and we're going to be talking about preparation in a separate video following this talking about all the gear you need so i know that everybody's probably going to be tuning into that one more because we all like gear don't we um but this one is the how to and the next video is going to be the gear just so you guys are aware and number two is take advantage of vulnerabilities we must remember that we're plo you know restraint escape a lot of times is like a poker game right you're not you're not necessarily playing the cards you're not necessarily playing against the tools you have you're playing against the person using them right so when we get into a lot of these restraints we're going to talk about how the human factor can sometimes be used and most importantly the laziness and complacency factors can be used to our advantage against an illegal restraint situation and then lastly think outside the box now this is something that is kind of hard to teach well i would think that's probably very impossible to teach but hopefully we're going to encourage people to sort of think outside the box when it comes to these restraints because a lot of times you've got to be very creative with how you get out of them and let's see here number four creating space during application now this one is crucial when it comes to restraints that aren't necessarily like handcuffed type restraints so uh when it comes to things like uh the first set we're going to talk about flex cuffs duct tape zip ties rope all that kind of stuff you can create space during the application process and that will aid in your release because if you're able to the way just the way you're holding your hands will prevent you from being tightened up to the point where you can't move at all you want a little bit of wiggle room inside all that and we'll talk about that here in just a second and we also have to remember the goals of the restraints themselves what are the restraints trying to do and really temporary control as any routine police officer really in any nation in the world will tell you uh restraints are temporary all restraints are temporary that's why usually there's a lot of things that go into restraints and the number one thing is never leave anybody in restraints alone it's because restraints all of them can be overcome with time and if they can't be overcome with time goals can still be accomplished so for instance even some of the most high security handcuffs in the world that cannot be picked that while you're wearing them at least they cannot be gotten out of while you're wearing them uh guess what you can still use them to assault someone and that can be uh be a goal for someone in restraints right so all restraints are temporary right we also have to remember that one of the main goals of restraints is really not to completely stop someone from escaping that's not their goal at all their goal is to slow down and escape so that by the time a subject has figured out how to escape from restraints they're already in a higher security area or they've already got higher uh they've already been swapped out for higher security restraints right um so that's something that we have to remember um as well and this is what we call uh um progressive security i'm not sure if there's an actual term for this but this is kind of the term that we think of it as it's kind of the thing we've coined ourselves so let's talk about that concept of progressive security for a second now when we're going to talk about progressive security we're going to use for an example these style standard police handcuffs now these are the smith wesson model 100 handcuffs by far the most popular and widespread uh most common commonly used handcuffs in the united states they can be bought for about 20 to 30 bucks on amazon they can be bought pretty much anywhere and shipped anywhere and they're used by pretty much every police department in the united states now these handcuffs are probably some of the least secure on the market when it comes to the features that they have and the ways to overcome them but this concept of progressive security can make these small handcuffs these cheap non-uh high security run-of-the-mill standard handcuffs uh completely unescapable and we'll go by talking about the different ways that you can escape from these handcuffs there are five main ways i'm sure there are more but these are the five that we have come up with and these are the five we have personally tested and can confirm work for this particular model so first up is a bobby pin you can simply take a bobby pin and use that as sort of like a the ability to disengage the locking pole right we'll talk about that a little bit more in depth when we get to the how to escape from these specific handcuffs but a bobby pin being used can simply be uh really discouraged by a double lock right so of course bobby pins can be used to defeat the double lock as well but guess what it's now you've doubled the things you have to do rather than using the bobby pin to sweep one way to open the locking pole you have to sweep the other way first to disengage the double lock then sweep back and and disengage the locking pawl that doubles the time that's required to get out of those handcuffs so next up is a hidden key and this is probably one of the easiest ones to identify is that guess what you know if you have a hidden key on your person which all of us do pretty much 24 7. really the easiest way to make sure that nobody has a key on them is a search right so if you search a person you search them thoroughly you do a a very thorough strip search and all that kind of stuff you can detect most hidden keys especially considering that a lot of these like you know people that are prepared for escaping from illegal restraints that people are going to have the plastic handcuff keys and things like that guess what usually they're not prepared they're usually not staged in scenarios so you're going to have all your escaping of asian equipment in a nice little plastic box or a nice little plastic bag in your pocket and all you know somebody has to do is stick your hand in your pocket oh look those are 100 of your escape tools nobody usually has them layered on their person day-to-day they only do it when they're in a situation which they might get taken right so we have to remember that even though we may have all this gucci gear we've got to take steps to make sure it's not found during a search immediately right at least by an adversarial force is not going to search that hard also being a hidden key can be overcome by putting you in a secure vehicle if you're thrown in the back say somebody's got like a like an old police car or something right and they're able to uh you know slap you in handcuffs put you in the back like even a criminal right let's just think of it in terms of a criminal trying to escape look even if they get out of the handcuffs in the back of a police car which happens by the way all of the time even if they're able to get out of the handcuffs in the back seat they still can't get out of the vehicle so so that's you know something to keep in mind as well is that like look you know and one of the reasons why progressive security just is one of those things that's easy to do uh up next is a chain break right breaking the chain and and um we'll of course talk about more talk about this more when we get to it but breaking the chain between the handcuffs is fairly easy to do especially after if you're handcuffed in front um you're gonna be able to do that about two seconds flat but an easy way to get around that is a blue box and we'll talk about that in a minute or really at the end of the series out here so that's one way to clearly make sure that nobody can break the chain and also placement if you put the handcuffs on behind somebody's back it's a little harder to do the chain break thing and all it's about is making it a little bit harder so if you double lock the cuffs put somebody in a vehicle put a handcuff behind their back you know you're really starting to to increase the security of these simple little old podunk you know really easy to get out of handcuffs another thing are shims right well shims can easily be defeated by double locks end of question there's no way to get around that right and another thing is these little these cool little micro escape saws that they can like you know they're either made of diamond or like a little tiny saw blade they can cut through even the hardest metal on the planet yeah those work and those can cut through these cuffs but it takes time and that's one of the things that you when you start adding all these things up if you slap some if somebody were to illegally detain you slap some cuffs on you double lock them put a blue box on them put you in the back of a secured vehicle and then watch you guess what you're not going to be able to get out of there because you also have to remember that being put in the back of a vehicle right impacts that as well and then also like i mentioned earlier the concept is you're never alone in handcuffs and we also have to remember that other things can be added as well putting a hood over your head like how many people out there practice restraining escape with uh with you know their eyes closed you know not that many and then how many people also have you know even own a set of like leg irons right those can be easily purchased online but not many people have them because well different reasons i guess i just don't think it's worth it but guess what instead of having to pick two locks or really just one lock if you're like us and if you're in this real situation where you have to escape you're not going to bother with doing the other handcuff just you know hang up handcuff it to your own wrist right uh so that you can get away uh who's going to go out and and do another set of leg irons right it takes time it's all about increasing the amount of time required to get out of the restraints that's all really these high security devices do is increase the time that it takes for you to get out of them increase the time so much so that by the time you figure out how to do it you're in another situation you're in a different set of restraints you're in a different holding area or whatever right because we must remember that most of these restraints are made with criminals in mind right but they can be used and are often used against regular civilians illegally as well alright so we finally arrive at our first type of restraint and these um this this is a sort of um category of restraint really that's not really worth breaking out and talking about separately because honestly these are are um while some of the most common improvised restraints honestly you can get out of these with enough time and with zero skill and zero practice so some of the things that a lot of people online and a lot of other far more qualified people in this subject area have talked about before are there strengths such as duct tape zip ties and rope those are the three most commonly used restraints by like home invaders or or terror groups or things like that and of course it is worth practicing getting out of these however once you've sort of figured out how to do this and once you've taken steps to prepare and you and and chances are if you're going to be taken captive by a group or an entity that is going to only use these tools to restrain you well then chances are they're not going to conduct a thorough search of your person and you can have so many tools at your disposal so that's why this this genre this category of escape restraints not really worth talking about far more people have already covered it already and honestly it's pretty simple to do so one thing that is slightly more worth talking about are things like heavy duty police grade military grade or whatever words you want to choose to describe very tough flex cuffs now we had originally talked about trying to demonstrate this but honestly it's really not worth it because trying to get out of these even the most um police grade uh commercially produced uh flex cuffs are still quite susceptible to this just using a buzz saw type action that pretty much every quote unquote seer expert on the internet has already shown everyone how to do this is such a common way to get out of this you can also use the popular v cutters which we'll talk about when we get into the actual kit building part of this series you can even use your boot laces you don't even really need kevlar cord if you have strong enough boot laces and they're thin enough like a normal set of military style boot laces that'll work as well paracord the the inner strands of paracord works astoundingly well even against the most thick of flex cuffs so that's kind of why it's like you know we wanted to dedicate our time to figuring out and showing how to get out of more tough to get out of restraints that hasn't quite been covered in such detail before so while yes we do use use these tools and and practice getting out of flex cuffs and things like that uh one must remember that that's once again the easiest restraint to get out of so if you're practicing the easiest thing all the time well how are you going to face the more difficult restraints so that's why we move on to more handcuffed style restraints which we're going to be talking about next all right so before we move on to regular handcuffs we must talk about kind of what i alluded to before we showed how to get out of flex cuffs is that there are a lot of different ways you can restrain somebody with handcuffs in fact just using the smith wesson model 100s or the peerless model 700s as an example there are eight different ways that these handcuffs either one of these handcuffs can be used to restrain someone and by far the most difficult one is the eighth one where you have them locked behind your back the cuffs are double locked and the key way is facing away from your hand right so up towards your arm away from like your palms and that is by far the hardest way to get out of really any handcuff and we must remember though that even though this is the hardest way that's the way we're going to show how to do it there are easier ways right people are lazy that's just a general rule out there so if you can take advantage of people being lazy and like i don't know not double locking the handcuffs well guess what your escape just became that much easier and chances are if anybody is going to be using this information that we were talking about if anybody is going to be using that information to escape an illegal type restraint chances are your person who's going to take you going to be taking you captive is not going to be looking at you with a um you know with a microscope right they're going to be probably going to be rounding up a lot of people at once and not exactly concerned about one person in particular right so that's just something to keep in mind so even though we're going to talk about the hardest way to get out of all of these there is still going to be a a good chance you're going to have the easier way of getting out and also before we move into it some of these ways you can't like with any pair of handcuffs there are eight different ways to get eight different ways to lock them on your person but for instance if you have a set of rigid handcuffs that are locked to the rear they're double locked and the key was facing away from your hand guess what there's no way you can get out of that so there are certain ways that you know unless you are a gymnast and are exceptionally flexible and unless you're able to get those cuffs to the front of your body which is what we recommend there's some ways you can't quite get out of them at all right and we'll talk about that when we get to those more high security handcuffs but right now we're talking about smith and wesson model 100s and peerless model 700s and this is what they look like so the smith and wesson on the left and the peerless on the right now we're only going to we're talking about these both at the same time because they're essentially both the same exact handcuff the only difference being kind of the general shape and the fact that peerless keyhole is in the center of the cuff and not on the on the side right with smith and wesson's now this is interesting because on the smith and wesson's that keyhole placement makes it a lot harder to get out of that keyhole being over here on the side and this other hole over here for the double lock that makes it so much harder to get out of because you can't just put your finger on the cuff and then feel around in this one area because on a peerless cuff guess what you put your finger in the center of the cuff and you're either going to feel something or you're not going to feel something right and that means okay if you don't feel anything if the side of the cuff is smooth guess what there's no keyhole there flip it over you feel on the other side oh i feel a little bump right in the middle that means or you know a little jagged piece a little a little depression in the metal guess what that's the keyhole on smith and wesson it's a lot harder to do because for one that double lock window is on both sides it goes all the way through the cuff so you've got holes on both sides and let me tell you unless you've practiced with this a lot when you're feeling around for the keyhole there is that double lock hole and that keyhole feel a lot alike you have to practice many many many hours before you're able to determine and feel the difference between the two once you've once you've practiced enough and you keep practicing you're able to feel it instantly and know instantly what it's which what is one but i remember all of us here looked like complete idiots because we spent hours trying to shove a key into that little uh double lock hole so uh that's why we're not going to talk we're not going to show you how to get out of the peerless ones or for the sake of time we're just going to go right after the hardest ones to get out of which are the smith wesson model 100s and the position that we're going to be using is a handcuff to the rear like normal right they're going to be double locked so it requires two key turns to to open them and we're also going to have the keyway facing away from the hand thus making it even harder to get that grip with a very tiny plastic key so let's go take a look at that video and i'll narrate through that all right welcome back everyone so here we are on the tabletop and we're going to be taking a look at the smith and wesson model 100s so like i said before these are some of the most commonly used handcuffs in north america by everyone from criminals to your local police department as it stands these are also some of the easiest to get out of so a lot of people get kind of caught up in the trap of trying and practicing to get out of these handcuffs and which is why you see these tutorials all over youtube and all over the internet talking about how to get out of these specific handcuffs and we're going to start off with that but the reason that we had this whole series is because these while they are the most common they are not the only ones and also they're some of the easiest to get out of so we run into kind of the sort of trouble that a lot of people in the sort of lock sport or beginning to get into the hobby of lock picking get into but like to buy their first lock pick set they'll they'll buy their first padlock and they'll start to pick it and then they'll they'll realize they'll figure out how to pick it and they'll be like oh cool this is awesome i can now pick locks well if you're practicing on a master lock which is the most common you know padlock to practice on well that's actually one of the most you know easiest padlocks as a really easiest brand as a as a company to get around in terms of lock picking they're basically the easiest locks to get out of so you know we all know the sort of analogy of you know you train to your you know lowest level you perform to your lowest level of training so uh meaning that if you could pick the easiest lock well what about the harder locks so same thing with this if you can pick these that does not necessarily mean you know how to get out of handcuffs or illegal restraints at all it just means that you you're good at one of the easiest ones now we're talking about now that that being said what we're talking about the smith and wesson model 100s because they are of the two most common handcuffs in america uh the peerless and these uh these are harder than the peerless so we're not even going to show the peerless because it's easy the differences between the two let me grab a shim right quick and i'll show you the differences uh the differences between the two is that on the pureless the key is right here key is right there in the center and that's what makes it easier because as i mentioned earlier you don't have this double lock slot here confusing your fingertip with the keyhole so that's what makes them easy and the peerless locks they uh double lock here with a with a pin so that you can take the back of the key [Music] and poke it and that will lock double lock the peerless handcuffs it also makes it harder to figure out if you've actually succeeded in picking the double lock because now right here on on this with the lessons you have a nice little window and you've got that nice little slot right there that shows you that little piece of metal that shows you uh these handcuffs are not double locked as you can see they're not double locked so like i mentioned uh before the easiest way by far to get out of handcuffs is with a key and there are many different ways of getting out of these um and uh the way we're going to show today is with the bobby pin so this is one of the most common ways to do it here's the thing with bobby pins uh with handcuffs in general um a lot of people get bent out of shape trying to figure out how to do handcuffs with these and this is of course a valuable skill that's why we're going to show it today but you also have to remember that look at what handcuff keys look like now look how small they have become this is a titanium one since the delta key of course this is the tiny inconspicuous handcuff key our personal favorite here and this is another generic [Music] i think this is a shomertech key plastic key that's been cut down it was circular but it's been cut down to be even a little bit more small so if you can get away with having this you can absolutely have this uh there's no reason why if you're able to retain a bobby pin on your person and your kidnapper or captor or whatever doesn't take this or any other small piece of metal paper clip or whatever there's a reason that they can't find this plus you've got to remember this is metal these or at least these two are plastic and don't uh cannot be found by metal detector they can only be found by physical search so honestly when it comes right down to it all of us here sure these are good to have on your person not only because they can get out of handcuffs with them but because they are can be used to fashion other tools as well but honestly if you get out of handcuffs just keep the key there's no reason to to work harder when you don't have to especially in times of duress and trust me getting out of these handcuffs with them behind your back and double locked with a hood over your head where you can your breathing is restricted guess what this is going to take a while whereas this is going to be a lot quicker so um yeah let's just go ahead and show some of the methods we could use to get out of this handcuffs so obviously the first method is using a key right so plastic key now one thing you must note about plastic keys and this is actually kind of an interesting exception right here the showmertech key here on these particular handcuffs is kind of sticky as you can see there it's a little i'm trying to push up my thumbnail it's a little sticky it's kind of hard to convey because you can't quite feel it but as you can see i'm running past a little bump there whereas if i take it's even hard to get out a little bit if you take the tiny inconspicuous handcuff key it goes in smooth but there's also a little bit of resistance right there if you take the delta key here let's just put that in there there's no resistance at all swings really smoothly [Music] and does that really well so one must that one thing you must keep in mind this is not a factor for the delta key at all but with these plastic keys you've got to be careful of the torque so if you torque that key too hard you could snap it off in the keyway that's something nobody talks about if you snap a key off in the keyway like in a in an emergency or you're trying to escape these illegal restraints uh you're gonna be in some serious trouble uh you're gonna be in some serious trouble if you're just practicing and break a key off in the keyway which we have done uh several times but yeah that's something to to keep in mind is your key strengths you're going to want to practice this kind of thing you're going to want to practice it's all based on touch and feel how how much effort is required but you know obviously you guys didn't come here to figure out how to use the key for the lock because that's not exactly getting out of it that's just bypassing really honestly or not even really bypassing just using the key for the lock you came to figure out how to use one of these bobby pins and this one i've already pre-made so let's go ahead and grab one here all right so here i have our brand new right out of the package bobby pin sorry if that's a little blurry for you guys the focus doesn't sound those cameras aren't that great so what we're going to do is separate it like this now you don't want to bend it all the way back because then it'll just snap and you need this little bit right here to hang on hang on to because you're going to have a considerable amount of leverage now i left this one like this because as you can see here there are little plastic bits on the end to protect people who use this for their hair right well if you see you've got to get those off right at least on this the straight side here and i'm just doing this and i can't using my fingernail i cannot pull that off so i have to use my teeth or another tool here so uh that is something to take in mind because guess what if you've got these behind your back can you you can't you're gonna be able to put this in your mouth to um uh use your teeth to do that so that's just something to keep in mind you might want to pre-stage these and practice this ahead of time so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna turn this a certain way because i know that this way works a lot better for me i'm going to insert this thing into the lock now a lot of people screw this up and they'll put this in and they'll push it all the way in no no no don't push all the way in just just a little bit and we're going to bend it just like that that right there that is perfect i don't know if you can see how much that bent or not but that bend is perfect let's see i've got a couple others over here this is too much this one also works but it's not perfect this one is perfect so i'm going to stick it back in there and bend it just a tad bit more there we go and basically we're turning the handcuff into our own tool to help us bend that by doing that so what we're going to do is we're going to sweep the lock we're basically putting this in trying to get it to where it's like that and then slowly sweep this way right and until we feel that locking pawl disengage so i'm going to do put it right in there and look at that just that easy that's what happens when you have the right tool in the job for instance i can try this one over here and you know this like i'm doing this i'm able to look at this handcuff keyway imagine not being able to imagine having to do this with your eyes closed with this behind your back it's going to be very very difficult to do a lot of people think i'm just going to keep bobby pins in my waistband and i'm i'm good to go right no it's going to take you half an hour to figure out how to do it so having the luxury of sight just for the demonstration here you can see how easy this works just come back in here of course it's not going to work the second time you go in there you sweep there you go locking paul disengaged and just to show you what's going on inside the lock here see if i can do this easily yep there we go i'm going to push this in sweep around and you see how that locking ball drops that locking pole disengages let's go with the teeth and there you go so that's how you get our handcuffs with a bobby king bobby pin i'm sure there are dozens of others that have shown this on youtube and easier how to do it oh before i forget uh the double lock so let me grab the key [Music] somewhere around here i've got one because you have to have the key to engage the double lock so [Music] ah here it is all right so same way with the double lock so as you can see here i'm gonna put in the background so you can see there's a little piece of steel right there that means these are single locked i'm going to put that in there and push that feeling you hear that big click and then now that piece of metal has been moved into here that shows that these keys these cuffs are in fact double locked right so go in and they won't go out so what you're going to do is the same exact motion but on the opposite side so if you're double locked you've got to sweep this way all right towards the outside of the cuff you got to do it with a pretty good amount of force okay almost all right boom so i swept all the way around the edge of the cuff and as y

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