Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)

skeptictank.org

185 points_vvdf98 comments

A nitpick (beyond the spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors throughout): The part about "most states in the Union require 24 hours before reporting a missing person" is nothing but a Hollywood trope. The fact is, most agencies require a missing person to be entered into their respective state's database within a few hours of the report. I can say unequivocally that Georgia has a two-hour window, as I've entered many such reports during my stint in law enforcement, and that is our state's requirement.

The reason they want to enter the person as soon as possible is so that any checks for that person's info will return a "hit" in time to locate the person. For example, George has dementia, goes for a walk at 8am, and is gone for several hours. He is reported missing at 12pm, and the police report is keyed into the state database by 1pm. At 2pm that same day, George is stopped by an officer and his information ran on the state computer. A hit shows up that states he's a missing-endangered person (endangered due to his mental state), the officer notifies his department so they can notify the family, and all is well. Now, if the bogus 24 hour rule was real, George never would have been reported the day he went missing, and perhaps would have met a grisly demise that night. Timely reporting is a potentially life-saving measure and I really wish television and the movies would stop it with that particularly dangerous bit of misinformation.

It's a trope with a basis in fact - that used to be the standard until relatively recently. I have had occasion to file 2 missing person reports and both times I was told on my first call that the person hadn't been gone long enough to justify a report. Both incidents were >10 years ago and obviously things have changed since then.

Then I would say the agency you called wasn't conforming to their state's regulations and was potentially endangering lives. I worked in law enforcement from 1999 to 2013 and missing persons cases always had a timely entry regulation during that time. My state's regulations are copied nearly verbatim from the federal rules (NCIC).

As I said, I was talking about the basis in fact rather than in law.

Depending on the agency and the situation there could be also very different policies regarding this, however I couldn't find a single regulation stating that there's a 24 hour period or that it had been changed.

If you say that an 17 yr old didn't came home they might say it's more likely that they are spending the night at a friend while a 9 yr old kid that didn't came home from school will spark an ember alert very quickly.

But in general the police cannot actually prevent you from filing any type of a report, you can go to any police station and a file a report that aliens have abducted your cat.

The scope of the operation also grows exponentially (or was it quadratically?) with time. Scent trails and tracks decay quickly, and at a fixed rate of travel the area in which the subject can be grows as time^2 (the area of a circle). At 2mph after 1 hour your subject is within an area of roughly 12 square miles. After 24 hours that area is more than 7000 square miles.

So agencies are generally interested in processing them quickly. That must be balanced against some filtering for bogus reports and incidents likely to resolve themselves, of course.

> Scent trails and tracks decay quickly

This is generally only an issue when it's a case of a missing-endangered subject; most missing persons reports are of a routine[1] nature (spouse is delayed in travel and can't be reached; child has run away for the third time that month). Having a blanket policy that requires timely entry of all reports will cover every scenario, especially since an otherwise routine missing person report can turn into an emergency situation after the initial report is made.

> incidents likely to resolve themselves

That's true, and the vast majority of missing persons reports I entered over a 14 year span were canceled within hours or at most, days, when the missing person returned of their own volition. But the ones who are found safe only as a result of the timely report stand in defense of the policy.

[1] Just as there is no such thing as a "routine" traffic stop and therefore officers should always be alert, there is actually no such thing as a "routine" missing person report either; but for the sake of this discussion, by "routine" in this case I mean "not urgent or endangered".

Fantastic info. Thanks for sharing that.

It's a really interesting topic and I'd say I was disappointed by the article for several reasons:

1. Very outdated in terms of the extent to which people hiding today would leave a digital signature. The article literally suggests leaving no available photographs of you, to the point where acquaintances have to work with a sketch artist to put your picture out.

2. Some very naive suggestions for jobs to take while on the run, including doing data entry, working as a day laborer, and joining the Peace Corps.

3. Made-up tinfoil-hat "facts". For example: "Satellites can bounce LASER light off of your windows and, by measuring the minute distance differences between a vibrating window and the satellite, reconstruct your speech -- from orbit!"

Note: this is not true. The pinnacle of laser surveillance (which is actually a real thing) is measured in the hundreds of meters.

This is actually a really cool topic, and best practices in escape and evasion are fascinating. I think the outline of a better manual would look like:

1. Figuring out where you're going to hide (best hope is bland suburb of large metro area in a far-away country where you're not ethnically unusual....e.g., Sao Paulo, Lagos, Taipei, or a frontier market that attracts a lot of expats, e.g., Mongolia, Nairobi, Manila). Additional discussion of extradition law and whether you should prioritize non-extradition countries relative to your country of citizenship. Additional discussion of how to learn the language and culture of your new home without attracting attention.

2. Figuring out how you're going to survive in your new life; refinement of potential destinations based on skill set, age, life goals, etc.

3. Prepping your new life (surreptitiously creating bank accounts, documents, contacts in new residence).

4. Making the break; how to disappear so that authorities classify you as missing and presumed dead.

5. Forensic considerations (facial recognition, DNA, voiceprint, fingerprints, digital signature).

Would be great to hear others' thoughts on what such a manual would look like, I love to nerd out on this kind of stuff.

Not totally on-topic, but interesting. Reconstruct sound by analyzing video of a potato-chip bag: http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_rubinstein_see_invisible_mo...

I think you just gave Light a heart attack.

> The pinnacle of laser surveillance ... hundreds of meters

I suspect the limitation is atmospheric distortion which astronomers have pretty much solved a ways back, by observing a laser pilot beam. Considering they can look through about a dozen km of air (upwards) like that, it's not a stretch to think spook gear can go a dozen km horizontally to a window.

That said, that's not a haystack tech; someone would be onto you already if they were using it.

The spooks do use similar technology to process downwards-looking images, but I still don't think they're at the point of reading your conversation off your windows from space, though, based off of the maturity of the various systems.

Does it matter, for practical purposes, if they do laser acoustics to your windows from space, or from a drone a few miles away?

Yes, it may matter which capability exists. If the capability exists from space, it means that they can easily switch between targets across a large swath of areas, as compared to deploying a drone near you. Have you seen laser acoustics deployed from a drone or similar platform before? It seems like getting a sufficiently stable mount on a drone would be a blocker here, although I'm not familiar with the state of that technology.

My company is developing sensors that implement these sorts of coherent interferometric ranging techniques, and I can say that it's pretty unlikely that it works from space or from a drone. There are a lot of non-obvious factors that make performing those kind of measurements from orbit a bit of a nightmare.

As far as I understand space comms--which isn't that far--the 'pilot beam' technique used by satellite links is more or less a way to get a phase lock on the signal beam, which will accurately determine the exact target location, at which point the space transmitter can use a beam-forming antenna to to jack up the power to that locale specifically, giving better SNR/bandwidth/whatever. The key bit here is that (a) the method requires that the target--i.e. your bedroom window--transmits the pilot beam up, and (b) only 'solves' the atmospheric interference issue by pointing a powerful beam accurately.

Don't get me wrong, it could probably be done with enough money, and if anybody could do it would would be the US intelligence machine. Same goes for a drone, to a lesser extent. With anything flying in the atmosphere you'll have to do deal with local vibrations on the same order as the measurement deltas you care about, but there are ways to do that too. It's interesting, thinking about it now, that a lot of what we're developing could actually be directly applied to such an endeavor, even though we're not related to such industries at all. Fun.

Yep, that's what I figured. Thanks for the input from someone with some real knowledge on the subjects.

>1. Very outdated in terms of the extent to which people hiding today would leave a digital signature. The article literally suggests leaving no available photographs of you, to the point where acquaintances have to work with a sketch artist to put your picture out.

Number 1 would be nearly impossible for me. Facebook has many photos other people uploaded which include me. My parents and girlfriend probably have more photos of me than I do of myself.

> Made-up tinfoil-hat "facts". For example: "Satellites can bounce LASER light off of your windows and, by measuring the minute distance differences between a vibrating window and the satellite, reconstruct your speech -- from orbit!"

I agree that this is untruthful, but speech reconstruction _is_ possible if the distance is much smaller (across the street, rather than dozens of km up in the sky).

> The pinnacle of laser surveillance (which is actually a real thing) is measured in the hundreds of meters.

You skipped the very next line, which says exactly this.

On top of that, while I don't think satellite laser listening tech exists, we don't in fact know what they are capable off.

I work with environmental data, part of which includes global measurement of wind speed at the water surface. Now, I'm certainly not an expert on how the sensors work exactly, but as far as I have read, satellites bounce microwaves off the surface of the water, where the wind creates ripples - not the big waves, but the small ones, often less than a centimeter in height. The scatterometer then analyzes the height differences of the ripples (differences are in millimeters or less) and runs a model to figure out how fast and from which direction the wind is blowing.

Based on this I would not be surprised if something similar as described in the grandparent post is possible with the latest and greatest in spy satellites. I'm guessing it would only be used with extremely high-value targets though. There is some interesting information available via the NRO if you dig around a bit.

Scatterometry is not accurately measuring distances or a elevation model. Instead it relies "on the fact that winds moving over the sea influence the radar backscattering properties of its surface in a manner that is related to wind speed and wind direction."

Source: http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet102/Gelsthorpe102.p...

Do you have any good references for your statement about laser surveillance? Generally speaking, although the us government is a wallowing pile of inefficiency, it generally tends to be true that our military technology is a fair bit ahead of where it is thought to be. I didn't even know satellite laser surveillance was a thing, so I am genuinely curious here.

You know the satellite laser thing can't be true. Even in the absence of atmospheric distortion a good satellite resolution is measured in centimeters. And that's for still pictures.

http://www.spybusters.com/Laser_Beam_Eavesdropping.html

For the most part, I don't see the point.

For me, at least, what matters is keeping stuff private that I want private. For everything else, my primary goal is being unremarkable, except for career reputation and so on. Trying too hard to disappear just attracts attention, no?

You're thinking along the right lines. They think in profiles of people that look or act a certain way. Some are much more traceable than others. You have to pick a profile that resists traceable tech while blending into that overall group. In my area, it's probably the rural rednecks given they have believable reasons to use little tech and mostly use cash. Those two traits, especially, have to be part of the culture to blend into less traceability.

Also, plenty nearby wifi connections for you to use with a cantenna. So, suburbs bridging city and rural types are best. ;)

Reminds me of https://evan.atavist.com/vanish

That was a great read. Thanks!

Yeah, that might have been the one I was thinking of. Clicking on this one made me think it was another article. Will be fun to re-read anyway. :)

That was really interesting. Thanks :)

I really enjoyed this article just because it reminds me so much of the early internet: wall-to-wall libertarian derangement. UCC 1-207. Sovereign Citizenship. And it got slashdotted by this link. Really takes me back.

I was just thinking that while reading this and enjoyed it for much the same reason. Everything about this page - the loose writing style, the borderline paranoia (although, given the subject, perhaps not without reason) and the antiquated - but perfectly readable - layout. It just screams early Internet. You can even pull up the source code and tell that, more than likely, it's hand edited.

It's like stepping back into the mid-90s, one of those random pages you might land on one morning at 3am - and you waited for it to slowly load on your 9600 baud modem.

Add an "under construction" sign and it would have been complete. :)

Ok you had me until 9600. If you said 28800 well.. :)

We went straight from 9600 baud to an ISDN line about 1997 or so. Completely missed the 28.8 and 56k era. :)

"I wish you the very best and hope that some of these suggestions and contact references prove helpful though most of it, I'm afraid, is probably unworkable, silly suggestions that won't help you one bit"

So the author himself admits that this is a bunch of silly nonsense that won't help you at all. For some inexplicable reason the article continues past this point.

Certainly an interesting writing style:

>Remove the radiator filler cap if the engine is cold. (Opening the cap with the engine hot can get you badly burned. The fluid can start to boil once the pressure is relieved and spray all over you. The fluid will be quite painful resulting in first and second-degree burns. It's not likely to be disfiguring but if you accidentally burn yourself, you can very well go ahead with your plan to escape however your mind might be focused entirely upon the pain and not upon escape. With the engine cold you don't have to worry about getting burned.)

That certainly seems like a rather elaborate way of explaining that touching hot things burns.

Problem is not in that the cap might be hot in itself (it even might not be), but that the action of removing the cap will relieve the pressure inside the coolant plumbing and as boiling point of fluids in dependent on pressure, the super-heated coolant will boil off violently.

Few years ago when I was changing thermostat on my car, the thermostat itself was not significantly hot in itself, but other parts of the coolant circuit apparently were, which after unscrewing the thermostat caused minor case of said violent boil-off. I didn't get burned mostly because I was standing to the side (as to reach to the screws that are obviously perpendicular to the flange which they hold).

That's not exactly what I was referring to, although I wasn't being very clear.

This is the part I was talking about:

> The fluid will be quite painful resulting in first and second-degree burns. It's not likely to be disfiguring but if you accidentally burn yourself, you can very well go ahead with your plan to escape however your mind might be focused entirely upon the pain and not upon escape.

Author seems to be overly focused on the results of such a burn.

I definitely got what you are saying, and as I read the article I was fighting the urge to proofread it and email the corrections to the author. Given the rambling nature and random paranoia, I get the feeling such corrections wouldn't be warmly received.

People get steam-scalded by car radiators all the time, even though they know that "touching hot things burns."

Very true. We warn people out here. My take is, if they know anything at all about it, that they intuitively think it will be OK when the car is off. They don't realize that the radiator keeps doing its thing for a while. I've had to shout to plenty of people "No, don't touch that shit! Wait an hour or two!"

It's the "little" things people rarely thing about that get them the most.

When I read his description of "radiator fluid" and dumping gravel into the oil fill of a car, I began to have my doubts, but when he suggested that a revolver with the cylinder swung out might still have a bullet in the chamber, all doubts that he didn't know what he was talking about were erased.

I wish it were organized in terms of utility relative to difficulty. Walking everywhere with a hat and buzz cut to avoid shedding hair is kind of insane and is more likely to attract attention than prevent you from being tracked by your DNA.

There definitely seem to be a mix of useful information and big brother paranoia. Instructions on how to kill a police dog sent to track you? Yeah, this is blurring from 'escape your shitty life' and into 'escape a dystopian enforcer squad'

'If you plan on going into hiding and want to leave a big hint, consider buying a copy of this book from the author immediately beforehand"

Heh, not to mention that the Kindle does a lot of phoning home.

You mean the "Kindel?"

Although it's quite dated, I'm willing to accept the author's claim that he originated much of the "how to disappear" stuff. And so I'd love to give him my $5. But perhaps ironically, Smashwords (the bookseller) only accepts PayPal and credit/debit cards. However, if some kind person would gift it to me, I would reimburse the price via Bitcoins :)

Sure, I can do that for you, though I guess you'll have to trust me. 18ajA8Joq6MrCP3VfXcZcsxYLgW5Man52W

Done. My email and Keybase proof are in my profile.

Thanks :)

Thanks. I've sent the book as a gift just now.

Thanks. Got it.

Rather interesting, though, the scope is limited to USA alone.

Supposing you make your way out of USA, a good solution for restarting your life is to join the French Foreign Legion. They'll take recruits from 17.5 - 39.5 years old. No questions asked, for a year. You literally start with a new name, an assumed identity which is a sign-up requirement. Their tagline is "the school of second chance."

You get fed, you get training, you get a salary. If in that year you do well, learn the language, learn soldiering, progress, you can get French citizenship. After the first year, you can either continue your career under your assumed identity, or reconcile your issues with your country of origin.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/french-foreign-legion.htm

This is completely inaccurate. They are highly selective and flooded with ex military from 3rd world countries. So a pudgy middle class westerner would have problems. There's a reddit AMA and a Vice article about it if you google. Also,it takes years before you get the citizenship.

Thanks for rightfully pointing out edge cases. I believe they excluded the VICE guy because he had a digital footprint that identified him, and that's a completely unfounded opinion. I'm not naive to think that there's not a vetting process, but when you're in dire straits, you need some hope and that's what FFL represents.

But they don't just take anyone. Here's an article about a guy who tried to join [1]. Here's another article about some people who made it in [2]. It doesn't seem as exciting as the image that a lot of people have (me included).

[1] http://www.vice.com/read/i-tried-joining-the-french-foreign-...

[2] http://www.vanityfair.com/unchanged/2012/12/french-foreign-l...

Evidently the Legion now asks for ID and runs recruits through Interpol prior to letting them join[0].

[0]: Things Google tells me when I should be working[1]

[1]: http://www.overseas-exile.com/p/french-foreign-legion-myths....

That's true, but at least in the past I've heard that the FFL will deny your existence to outside parties. One story I read said that a soldier got into a fight in France and then went back to the Barracks. The police came and asked for him and they said "no one here by that name."

I have no idea if they still do it.

Also, if it's a serious crime, they have no issue with turning you in.

It's a cool concept. Fingerprint databases kind of throw a monkey wrench at it though (if your fingerprints are in a database).

yeah and they get 'leaked' and you are screwed. or they just snoop around figure out that you weren't Jason Bourne at all but actually David Webb. cue music...

I love this thing because if you remove the first four points, it's just a good how-to about life in general. Actually if you follow these rules you may never have to vanish :

#Discard your old life. #Limit the resolve and resources of your opposition. #Run from your opposition (and your old life.) #Hide from your opposition.

Make new friends. Acquire a (new) identity. (Legal papers: Birth record, Social Security #) Find gainful employment. Pay your taxes. Get medical, life, and automotive insurance. Get a credit card -- and keep it paid up. Perhaps take college courses to learn a new marketable skill. Acquire and maintain respectability in your community. Find a wife or husband: Make a (new) family. Don't drink heavily, don't use any illegal drugs, don't do any crimes. Die with dignity.

That's definitely a little idealistic on several levels. First because of this* quote, which describes the reality we live in. Secondly, that assumes that living a life that adheres to the law is totally fair an just. History is full of acts of civil disobedience which in some cases could require people to disappear.

* "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience

Good thoughts, where they stayed on the topic. Too much political commentary for me.

Lovely, but my favorite is http://www.wikihow.com/Survive-Living-Through-a-Coup reportedly from a person who's survived quite a few back in the day.

"Has your country's dictator been overthrown? Did he seem fatherly and protective or just overbearing and threatening? Are you feeling confused as to what to feel? Have you exchanged one bad situation for another? Has the military decided they know better how to run things? If any of these things apply to you, you'll find yourself in a country in turmoil and it's time to think about your immediate survival needs."

It contains plenty of seasoned, golden advice, eg.

"Don't panic. The worst thing to do in any situation is to panic."

As well as some useful guidelines on how to deal with harsh political reality of a revolution:

"If there are more than one party up for vote, request time with them to see what they believe in. Pick the one that more closely fits with your values."

On one hand the author says that if you're running from a crime you will get caught. But then after gives tips to escape from someone with the ressources and determination to have skin samples from hotel rooms analysed and access to thermal imaging satellites.

Looks to me like the author doesn't know what people would be running from. I doubt the authorities would use LASER SURVEILLANCE SATELLITES for anything they intend to pursue with less zeal than a very serious felony.

I figure the author doesn't want to overtly advise people to evade law enforcement because he doesn't want to get into trouble.

If you want to disappear, maybe you should do it in a place other than America, so that you will not need to so thoroughly marginalize yourself (panning for gold?!).

I would start from the other side and start learning about how surveillance works, and the numerous forms of SigInt/HumInt that can grab you anywhere. If you want to disappear but you still want to use credit cards, a smart phone, drive around in a car or login to regular websites (social media for sure) from the same computer, I question your dedication :-)

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned a very infamous person who disappeared for many years. Whitey Bulger.[1]

All it takes is friends and money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger#Fugitive

Actually have you ever been to an Ikea alone? You can get pretty lost..

This reminds me very much of Breaking Bad when Walter went to the "vacuum cleaner" who hid him in a cabin in the woods and had to follow many of the rules outlined in this article.

This linked video is very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxpUc8lj-CY

The image on the RHS, besides being difficult to read has spelt "Kindle" wrong

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