How to disappear in America without a trace | Hacker News Reader

How to disappear in America without a trace

skeptictank.org

124 pointschaosmachine32 comments

I'm confused by this block: "This information is offered in the public domain, copyrighted by Fredric L. Rice (1999-2009) who grants permission for some or all of the text to be used elsewhere for non-commercial purposes."

If you offer a creative work into the public domain, you're giving up copyright and can no longer dictate how that work is used.

He's trying to gloss over international laws. In some countries, you can't put something in the public domain except by your copyright naturally expiring. It's not the best example of legal writing, though.

This is all a bunch of tin-hatted flim-flam, but I would be seriously interested in seeing what advice a group of actual security professionals would put forward.

Here in the UK, I can't begin to imagine how hard it would be to go missing and stay missing. Cars are tracked by Automatic Numberplate Recognition systems, bus and train stations all have plentiful CCTV, the cash economy has been decimated - its an interesting thought experiment when considering our levels of state surveillance. As far as I can work out, your only options would be destitution or a dinghy across the channel.

And yet http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-missing-e...

You know you can just fly to some where else than Britain.

Wow, this is a trip:

Toss your wiping materials down the toilet. (If you're on an airplane, don't toss anything down the toilet as it goes to a holding tank which can be raked for evidence later. Carry-out your wiping papers with you inside your shirt under an armpit and flush them in a normal toilet when you can. (Note: Visible bulges under your shirt will be considered by flight attending employees to be indicating the real possibility that you're smuggling drugs. If you must hide a lot of wipe materials, you should distribute them among your body to eliminate bulges, otherwise you may be escorted to a little white room and made to strip. When they find you're hiding damp paper towels, you'll have some explaining to do.)

I liked the part telling you that satellites can record your conversations from space by bouncing lasers off of your windows. And the part advising you to bring along any police dogs you might happen to kill, to keep from leaving evidence. And the part that gives "assistant to elderly Navajos" as a top employment opportunity. Wonderfully imaginative, if nothing else.

AFAIK, sound can be recorded using laser reflections on windows, but not I imagine from space, where there would be too much atmospheric interference. I also imagine that single glazing would help.

Even more important; the speed of the things :)

This is why much of the satellite "intel" you see in films is pretty bunk.

Not only that, but there needs to be some way to detect the bounced beam -- implying a ridiculous degree of accuracy in the placement of the satellite, the smoothness of the glass, and the strength of the laser.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone

Yes, you're told to kill unescorted police dogs, not by strangling them, as that would take too much strength, but by lifting them off the ground and shaking them until their neck breaks. I look over at the 85lb American Bulldog next to me and can't conceive of many people being able to pull that one off. (The preferable way, of course, being to drive a knife through the dog's braincase. (wtf?))

Smelling like shit isn't going to turn any heads? No one will notice that.

I think they were talking about the papertowels that you use to wipe off fingerprints/hairs/etc from the bathroom. There's no point in trying to hide your crap-covered toilet paper, because you've already dumped your actual crap into the toilet. In general though, no one is going to be sifting through airplane toilets looking for your DNA. The only thing that you might be protecting yourself against is if 'they' are looking for someone else by sifting through the toilet contents, and happen to match your DNA against something they have on file somewhere.

Very interesting articles from Wired where one of their writers tries to disappear and there's a contest to find him:

http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/08/author-evan-ratliff-is-o... http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/ http://www.wired.com/vanish/

It was stupid because he was tweeting from a known twitter account. Presumably no one that is trying to vanish should be holding on to such accounts.

It was a fun read but nothing more than that. On the one hand he was intentionally playing a bit of cat and mouse for the drama of the contest. On the other hand, he didn't have to actually earn money or do anything that might require providing identification. So it was a pretty artificial set of conditions.

What a dumb collection of paranoid fantasies.

Exactly, but that's what I liked about the article!

It's just intelligent-sounding enough that a foolish person might on it's suggestions. Bad thing.

Even if the stuff in this guide actually worked I can't imagine the life he's advocating being more pleasant than sticking around and dealing with your problems in more than a few limited circumstances.

The "destroy photos" step seems like it would be difficult to accomplish nowadays. Most recent photos (of me, at least) are digital, and many people have copies of the image files.

Here's another one: clear this article from your internet history.

Bring negative attention to powerful corporations / influential individuals

I think it is missing one key piece of advice - move to Alaska. After living there for several years I can't count how many people I ran into that were running from something and they never seemed too worried about getting found.

I wonder how you manage that. There's either two border crossings or a whole lotta swimming to get there. Once you're there, though, I imagine you're home free.

I imagine that most of the people there that were 'running from something' weren't running from Border Patrol or the CIA. More likely they either skipped bail for some minor charges, or were running from something like child support, minor drug charges, etc. Things where people have no heavy motivation to seek you out other than to put your name on 'watch lists' (e.g. someone is notified if you use a credit card in your name or something like that).

Wouldn't border patrol check against the watchlist? Canada at least knows if you're on the list of concealed handgun permit holders.

I guess with enough forest to sneak through and a "clean" buddy to drive through the borders and pick you up, you'd make it. This kid did it, and he was one of the first big BC Bud smugglers: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7683923/kid_cannabis

If you sneak over the border, wouldn't you just want to stay in Canada rather than go all the way to Alaska?.

There are lots of ways to travel to Alaska without crossing an international border. There is regular ferry service from Washington, for example, and air travel, of course.

Without spending a lot of time on Wikipedia and looking at SSI statements I can't verify this, but I'm fairly sure that many years ago I worked with a murderer on the lam, who remained at large for a good twenty years till people recognized him from America's Most Wanted. He had been a white collar worker and was then a short order cook. His big asset was drabness. He did not stand out, he did not say much, and if you thought you might have seen him you could not say where or how. I think this sort of thing must be a lot harder to do now.

Very impressive how resilient society is, if you combine this article with the current economic recovery. The sheer number of checks and balances keeps it going.

While the author says stuffs like "not to be used by bad persons", he also writes long shits about evading pursuit in the woods, killing dogs as needed, or getting out of cars while an helicopter is watching. Definitely weird, paranoid, but entertaining. You can indeed find stuffs in the same spirit in some Hollywood movies -- "Enemy of the State" comes to mind.

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