Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened | Hacker News Reader

Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened

wired.com

37 pointsdiego18 comments

5% reality, 95% dramatization. It's not hard to disappear if nobody is looking, and in this case the "search" was an artifice created by WIRED. However, it's entertaining nonetheless.

I've "disappeared" a few times simply going about my business--by moving to new cities knowing hardly a soul, and starting from scratch: Quetzaltenango in '03, Beijing in '07 and now Buenos Aires in '09.

It can be terrifying to realize that you really can walk away from everything you've ever experienced and take for granted. It's kind of like pre-living your own death. You see exactly who remembers, who cares, and who doesn't.

And when you choose to re-engage, you deeply understand that everybody you let into your life is a choice, not an obligation.

This is a fascinating subject.

I recommend the novel "Oracle Night" by Paul Auster for its treatment of this topic. At the core of "Oracle Night" is a short passage from Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon," reproduced in full here: http://www.fallingbeam.org/beam.htm. This story within a story within a story is about a man named Flitcraft who is walking to lunch one day when a beam from a construction site falls next to him, narrowly missing him. The experience rattles him so much that, after lunch, he walks away from his job, wife, kids, and city, and starts a brand new life elsewhere, never looking back.

Another work that touches on similar themes is the novel "Fearless" by Rafael Yglesias, made into a movie in 1993 starring Jeff Bridges.

As you say, it can indeed be sobering to consider how thin the threads are that tie us to our lives.

What a fascinating read. Thank you for the pointers. Oracle Night will be the first book I buy for my new Kindle, which arrives in Buenos Aires on Friday.

Speaking of which, the international Kindle makes dramatic, life-altering geographic purges all-the-more palatable to those of us who live on bread, water, and books.

That was really long, but actually quite interesting. It seems as though he could have disappeared if he hadn't been quit so sloppy. Plus, he did a few things deliberately to leave hints. So, if this were a matter of life and death instead of just a game, he probably could've vanished.

Yeah he was caught basically because he was still using twitter, Facebook, etc. under his new identity. If he had really "dropped off the net" it's unlikely he would have been traced.

Maybe, maybe not. At least once, being on the net allowed him to see that he was close to being caught. Also, he did make use of it to throw off pursuers.

Really, though, it wasn't that he shouldn't have been using twitter. Facebook, etc., it was just that he had gotten a bit too cocky and a bit too sloppy.

Instead of using a stationary relay machine in Las Vegas, he should have used a laptop connected to a mobile broadband card. That would have been quite difficult to trace. Even if you can get the IP address of one of those cards, you still only have a vague idea of where it is. If you are the law, then how do you approach the judge to get a search warrant? You have no address to ask for a search of! You can buy such a mobile card in one part of the country, then carry it with you to another, so no useful address need be attached to it.

What's more, you can arrange to have such a machine mailed to a different location across the country. In one day, for the price of a Fedex, your relay is in a different state.

From page 4:

"On board, I staked out the bus’s backseat, where I could use my laptop without anyone looking over my shoulder. With a $150 wireless broadband card from Virgin Mobile, the only nationwide service that didn’t require a credit check, I had almost uninterrupted online access."

Yes, but that was the machine on hand and not the relay. Before having someone read more carefully, be sure that you have read them carefully.

I agree, although it isn't so much that he was using the net per se -- he was caught because he couldn't stop following his own case. But that is probably typical.

It's actually amazingly common. I don't remember the specifics, but I saw a really interesting story about this. Whenever someone disappears, investigators will immediately setup various internet honey-pots. Apparently the vanished, very often, simply can't stop checking in on their old selves. Including folks wanted for very serious crimes.

I agree; it sounds like it was actually so easy for him (after taking the time to exercise appropriate precautions) that he felt he had to make it more interesting by purposefully leaving hints and doing the "challenges."

But it sounds like part of the deal was that he would have an online presence.

'Tried to vanish' but posted updates, in public, to twitter (at least long enough for google to cache them) - does not compute...

He then stopped using Tor. Or his remote-login Vegas computers as proxies. Reopened his twitter account to the public. Added local businesses as friends on twitter.

This is one of the most interesting articles I've read in quite some time.

The main reason he was caught is not necessarily that he was careless or left clues, he was caught because the whole thing was designed to be a game (experiment?) orchestrated by Wired. Ratliff had hundreds, maybe even thousands of people with incentives ($5000, notoriety, the challenge, etc.) looking for him. I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did given that he was also 'trying' to get caught.

However, as other commenters in this thread mention, if he had done this independently and planned a little longer than he did, he most certainly could have vanished for up to a year.

Edit: spelling.

Nice to see that the article credits some work done by a HN reader in the search (as preposterous as this fake search is).

What I don't understand is how the general public gets access to information about his ATM withdrawals.

It's mentioned somewhere in the article that Ratliff's editor at Wired was given access to his bank accounts. The editor then leaked details of the transactions online.

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