Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Would Your 'I've Got To Disappear' Plan Look Like?
New submitter diacritica writes "This Ask Slashdot is inspired by manhunts à-la-Bourne movies, but taking a more realistic approach to the world we live in. You are native to and live in a big city (> 1M pop) in a G8 country of your choosing. At T = 0h, you accidentally witness a strange event. At T = 1h, you realize you're being followed and you get the feeling that the police/government might be involved. Contextual data: you are able to speak one language apart from good English. You are 25 to 45 years old. You are computer savvy. You are engaged/married, you have family living in the same city. 99% of your money is in a bank account. You prefer to go 'rationally' paranoid. What would you do in order to feel safe after those first 24 hours? Remember, you didn't commit a crime, but there are plenty of real-world resources invested in catching you."
The first rule of secret escape plans is that you keep them secret.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Withdraw enough cash to feed yourself for a week, then leave. Go camping. Get out into nature. If technology is your concern, get away from the technology.
I'd get a good lawyer, let the press know what I'd seen and then go to the police and give them a statement.
Record yourself recounting everything you saw, then post the video to as many sites as you can. The more you can say about the event the better, don't make it short and look like you know more then you're saying. Start babbling if you can manage it.
That way, there is not much of a point silencing you, since you've already done the worst you could.
Ya blew it.
That's really all there is too it. You need cash to disappear. "They" would've already frozen or started watching your assets.
You're already dead.
and the police will find a large cache of child porn or marijuana or bomb-making material (or all of the above) in your house/car.
I think my plan is safe enough to say aloud... French Foreign Legion.
Because his fears of political persecution are very justified. He is risking to spend far more time locked inside a room in the Ecuadorian embassy than he would get in the worst case scenario if he was judged guilty in Sweden (which is not very likely). Does that seem like someone running from "serious accusations"?
It's a formal and serious allegation which he is avoiding answering to by hiding.
Yes, he's avoiding answering them by asking Swedish prosecutors if it was ok to leave the country before he did, and then inviting them to interview him either remotely, or in person in the Ecuadorian embassy. All opportunities were declined. It's obvious that it's not his testimony they want, it's his physical presence. He even volunteered to go to Sweden, as long as guarantees were offered that he would not be extradited to the US. They guarantees were never given.
Read up on the extradition laws and you'll find it's *harder* to be extradited from Sweden than the UK, and that if he gets extradited to Sweden then *both* Sweden and the UK have to consent to extradition to the US on charges that haven't even been brought yet.
Just like it's illegal for the US to hold you without trial. Doesn't particularly seem to have stopped them. The underlying assumption to your statement is that the people/countries involved care about the law, or think it applies to them. From previous experience, they know they can pretty much do whatever they want, and they're not going to be called on it by anyone that matters.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
FBI Weenie #001: "You know, we are a bunch of wankers after all." Sips Natural Ice from can.
FBI Weenie #002: "True. And we do suffer a lack of creativity." Sips Natural Ice from can.
FBI Wennie #001: "I'm bored out of my mind. It's been ten years since we had any real terrorists to deal with." Sips Natural Ice from can.
FBI Weenie #003: "Hey! Lets go mine slashdot and get some ideas. There's always a good one somewhere in the threads." Sips Natural Ice from can.
FBI Head Weenie: "Alright, I'll contact Stratfor and get them to whip up an Ask Slashdot title." Sips Budweiser from can
Moments later: Thousands of Slashdot readers see in their rss feeds: Ask Slashdot: What Would Your 'I've Got To Disappear' Plan Look Like?
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
"Become invisible, wear solid black (or white) clothing, no logos, brands or anything else immediately identifiable."
IOW, try to stand out in the crowd?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Most of you failed to read the FP, and even if you did, seem to have skipped the obvious first step.
* You have someone following you. You haven't yet manage to elude your potential captors.
* You don't know that your pursuers have government ties, just suspect it.
* You don't know that "they" actually know your identity yet - Even the MiBs don't really know everything instantly.
* You have almost no money on you (or if 1% counts as "enough", you have enough money to get a damned good lawyer).
You can test two of these and potentially fix one with one simple move - Go into the nearest branch of your local bank and take out a modest, odd-sized sum of cash well under $10k... Perhaps $3450 (no need to go crazy with precision, virtually all legit debts in the four-digit range will round to the dollar, and often enough to the 50s - And keep in mind that 35 bills will cause a very sizable bulge in your pocket). If the bank gives it to you, then "they" either don't know your identity, or don't belong to the government (note that the latter doesn't make you any safer - Plenty of NGOs pose as much, if not more, of a threat to you than the government-proper). If the bank tries to make you stick around for more than two minutes, time to vanish into the woods, penniless or not (and if "they" can get to the bank and nab you in under two minutes, sorry dude, you had no shot from the moment you saw A Strange Event, so might as well get it over with).
So, assuming you have a decent wad of cash (if you have either died at this point or know you can look forward to a life of hermitage in a mud hut in the Great North Woods, not much more advice matters, so turn to page 99, "the end")... Task #0a: Leave a message with your lawyer describing your situation and asking him to look into it, and say that you'll contact him in a week for an update. Task #0b: Leave a goodbye message (you can do that directly with most cell phones, without actually ringing the line) for anyone you care about - This will both protect them and make you less likely to do something stupid like try to go home three months from now. Take this chance to wipe your phone (not that they can't recover it, but might as well make it a bit of a challenge)
Task #1, lose your tail. Easier said than done, but we've all seen plenty of trick in movies you could try. Personally, I'd favor large crowds with lots of cover, ie, a shopping mall (outdoor market, all the better, but we don't have a whole lot of those in the US). Wander around for a while, always heading for the largest crowd you can see, and try to leave by an unusual route. At some point early in this step, "accidentally" leave your phone in a conspicuous place, preferably with lots of teens around. Someone will kindly pocket it for you and provide a new non-you moving target.
So you've lost your tail. Task #2, get the hell out of Dodge. "They" will watch most forms of public transit, so a series of hailed cabs or hitchhiking will give you the best chances. If you can get to a bus depot in an outlying suburb, you have a chance. Go to a different state.
On your first stop, buy an activate a pair of Tracphones. Mail one to your lawyer, and one to your wife (or mother). Now Pretend you still have a tail and repeat steps 1 & 2. Do it again. Bonus points for finding alternate means of transportation than buses and taxis (commuter trains don't ID you, long-haul ones sometimes do, airports always do).
So... Now you consider yourself more-or-less safe to stop and think for a while. Get a good night's rest, get a complete makeover (hair/beard style and modest color change), get some new clothes. Get another Tracphone, activate it, but don't call anyone yet.
Have your next bus ticket ready, and take a taxi/T to the opposite side of the city. Call your lawyer's shiny new Tracphone and see if he has anything useful to tell you. Don't automatically believe
Yeah, I mean if you witnessed something like that and there were people after you, wouldn't they just shoot you on the spot? "Oh no, a witness to my heinous crime! I think I'll conspicuously follow him around and menace him while he empties his bank account and gathers his guns, and then mysteriously stop following him while he secrets himself to an undisclosed location. I can't lose!"
Assange isn't hiding. Why do you keep saying he is? The whole world knows exactly where he is. The two girls who accused him traveled off to who knows where. All this over Sweden wanting to "question" him? Get friggin' real. If Sweden wasn't in cahoots with the US in an extradition agreement of some sort, the ass hats in Sweden could travel to the UK and question him. The two girls were *groupies*. They wanted his penis in them. Nothing more, nothing less. If they gave a damn they would have stayed in Sweden to press charges. Serious sex crime? Give me a break. Two groupies became pissed off when they talked and found out he was fucking both of them. Cry me a river...
Hmmm - I think the GP was refering to prepaid cards such as VISA or Mastercard that you can pick up at your local 7-Eleven and load with balances up to $1000. I use those cards myself when I want to purchase something from a web site that I don't completely trust to be PCI compliant. The cards costs about $3, can be bought and loaded using cash and there are no identification taking place whatsoever. I use them to avoid fraud, but they are equally useful to make purchases completely anonymously. As for cashing out your savings.... you could conceivably do this by visiting a number of different branches. Most banks will at least allow you to cash out around $10K without too many questions. Do that 2 or 3 times and you should be able to comfortably survive for at least 6 months.
Meus subcriptio est nocens Latin quoniam bardus populus reputo is sanus callidus
If Assange's defenders could rise to the moral level of accepting what rape is and accepting that the allegations are rape, we could rise to the moral level of Assange himself and accept the seriousness of the charges. Then we can discard the potential for extradition by demanding he stand trial or face charges for his alleged crimes, with a guarantee that he won't be extradited for unrelated reasons. If you read the other responses, you'll see that the left has not risen to this moral point, and instead has become rape defenders.
I am a WikiLeaks supporter. I even think Assange has been a positive force in terms of journalism. That doesn't mean he isn't a rapist.
Pretending that violating sexual consent is anything other than rape only undermines WikiLeaks and Julian Assange's journalistic work. And it ensures that he can be extradited for unrelated reasons by muddying the waters.