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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

First you go to Mexico. Then you go somewhere without extradition.

Although if I had high resources and was fleeing justice, I probably wouldn’t buy a ticket ahead of time. If anything I would book some domestic travel to be on flight manifests.

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There really aren't that many places that won't extradite an American back to America. Like, North Korea and maybe Iran. All the other countries famous for not having extradition treaties with the US like Vietnam are happy to extradite on a case by case basis.

There are plenty of countries that won't extradite their nationals as a matter of policy like China, Russia, Switzerland, Lebanon, and so on (it's most of the world, probably), but the vast majority won't bat an eye to throwing her back to the US based LEO wolves.

I think it is less about not having an extradition treaty as it is just living in a country that doesn't really actively search for people needing extradition. as long as you have good paperwork for wherever you live and stay the hell off the radar of local authorities, you could probably do okay in lots of central/south american countries. avoid europe and all of their nanny cams with facial recognition. avoid getting online with your old persona's credentials and visiting old family/friends. could probably do pretty well

Something I've always sort of wondered: If you live on a yacht in international waters, will the US Navy come and pick you up? For someone of Ms. Holmes' level of GTA stars.

What would Holmes’ GTA star level be? I mean, IRL in terms of absolute scale of crime maybe 2/5, but in-game it’s usually more violent activity only that gets stars. This needs further discussion, maybe with some consultation from Rockstar.

that's similar to the people that tried to form a country on the deep sea platforms. a submarine launched torpedo would render the country no longer effective while completely invisible to any prying eyes. or a team of underwater welders cut the legs out from under it. again completely hidden from view. "I don't know what happened. One day it was there. The next it was gone!"

There are a lot of unrecognized territories in the world. Wa State, Western Sahara, Rojava, Palestine, Transnistria (remember hacker weev?), Ambazonia, Artsakh, wide swaths of factions in central Africa. It's impractical to extradite people from these regions, although perhaps if they're badly enough wanted the CIA can toss them in a bag and just straight up drive them out or bribe others to do same.

It's thought for instance intelligence may know wanted British terrorist Samantha Lewthwaite is in Kenya or Somalia, but impractical to extract due to being controlled by Al-Shebab. Nobody is gonna send the troops/3 letter goons into some no-mans contested land over some non-violent holmes like character.

Would banishing yourself to Western Sahara for the rest of your life be that much better than spending a decade in some low security prison?

Cooba!

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