How to tell if you're being followed.
Two questions: first, who do you think you are? Are you really so secret and important that someone is prepared to spend time and money watching where you're going? During the 1980s miners' strikes the press reported that an associate of Arthur Scargill fled the United Kingdom, convinced that the British "secret police" were following him. Why should they? It would have been perfectly obvious where he was and what he was doing: organising strikes is hardly clandestine. (He took refuge in East Germany, of all places.)
Second, is there someone out there who very badly wants to know what you're doing, who believes that surveillance is the only way to find out, and who is able to follow you themselves or pay someone else to? Unless such a person or organisation exists, forget it.
Good writing reference.
Filed under :: Writing and Language
This is particularly true in the era of electronic surveillance. Actually sending agents out to follow ONE person is SOOOOO expensive and inefficient that you need to be REALLY important to make those resources worth expending.
Now, if you simply move out into the country and suddenly there are a lot of remote control planes start flying in the area . . .then you might actually be under surveillance. Of course it's a lot more likely to be the DEA than the FBI.
It would have been perfectly obvious where he was and what he was doing: organising strikes is hardly clandestine. (He took refuge in East Germany, of all places.)
Okay, now that bit is hilarious considering some of the bizarre considering the things I have read about the STASI doing to everyone in that country. One of the more amusing was a woman who the STASI had targeted and they decided to Gaslight her by having an agent let the air out of her baby carriage tires every time she went to the store.
But then again, former members of MI-5 have admitted to tapping phones and other such activities to subvert the union and the strike, and since Scargill was a leftist union leader and member of the Communist Part of GB, and the 80s was during the time of Thatcher when she was in open warfare against the Unions in the UK, there is paranoid and then there is being right.