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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."
I wouldn't go out and get laid.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Nice try.
see title
new sig
1) Hide in the Ecuadorean embassy.
2) Hire a lawyer.
The first rule of secret escape plans is that you keep them secret.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
What Would Assange Do?
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.
...that I posted my plan to /.
Then, after I had succeeded in hiring a good lawyer, and maybe a bodyguard, depending on who I thought was after me... start posting whatever it was I saw to every communal blog and forum I could think of, then start spamming newspapers with it, too. If I've done nothing wrong, why hide?
If you wanna be disappeared, just turn yourself in.
Please write my book for me.
Any G-8 country, you say? I pick Russia.
First step: Start preaching revolution.
Second step: Unneeded. I've already disappeared.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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.
Nobody will ever hear from me again or know who I am that way.
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.
I'm not interested in running for the rest of my life, so my goal would be to solve the problem permanently. If the problem is that I witnessed something, then I'd get my testimony and any relevant information in my possession as widely distributed as I could. Once the information is beyond containing, stopping me will no longer solve my opponent's problem. They'll have bigger problems to worry about than me. You can distribute your materials from anywhere these days - record a video on your phone, upload it to as many websites as possible, stick it on Wikileaks, email the press...
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Hour 1.5, go to local soup kitchen :( ...
Hour 2, trade half of your 1% of your money not in a bank account for a bum's SIN and dirty ratty clothes.
Hour 3, attempt to submit forms for a birth certificate for said bum
Hour 4, use remainder of 1% to buy copious USB devices
Hour 5, spend an hour creating USB devices that "phone home" when plugged in (you want at least 20-100 USB's here)
Hour 6, pretend to lose these near where the government agents might be (also why you need many)
Hour 7, hopefully get a hit - start enumeration and finger printing on FBI (or what ever agency is after you)
Hour 8, check into a motel under a fake name
Hour 9, pull a Kevin Mitnick and setup a pager/cellphone to notify you when they are going to setup the Sting
Hour 9.5, put on dirty ratty bum's clothes and GTFO coz they've set up the sting and are on their way to the motel, if you're lucky no one will see you
Hour 10, sit in busy area of city pan handling in the bums clothes
Hour 24, no one will notice you for 14 hours or more because no one cares about homeless people
6-8 weeks later: obtain your fresh new birth certificate
day after: apply for a new passport, say you're traveling soon and get it rushed, use the money you pan handled to pay for it
week later: have your new passport, leave the country under your new identity
Enjoy!
I only let in celebrities - or at least internet celebrities.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I do not speak another language besides English, though I can get by in French.
- ATM, get cash.
- Drive to airport, ditch car in cell lot.
- Bus into town, taxi to real bus station, bus anywhere.
- Disposable phone. Use my wife's Google Voice account to leave her a message. Thrown in the trash at any bus stop.
- Another bus ticket. Different direction.
- No McDonalds. Taco Bell, or worse, for food. I'm known for my fast food habits, let's not make it too easy.
- I'm inclined to cross the border at a place I know they are perpetually lax in one direction. I won;t be coming back for a while.
- Find work in a kitchen. Cliché, but hey. Or landscaping. You can do this easier than you think, and I can pretty much make up Social Security numbers, easy when you know the formula. I will, of course appear to be very old. And my favored employer won't care. They still exist in North America
Maybe this keeps me alive for a month. I obviously will not be very happy.
- Slither into the library/etc. and create a Slashdot indentity.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Luckily enough, this will not cause any change in your plans...
TBH, one other poster has a good idea. If you disappear for a couple of months you're likely to drop away and be lost until they look again for you for some reason. Go camping for a while.
Whilst you're "offline", work out what evidence you have and figure out a dissemination policy. If you have none, work out who is "after you" and what that means to them, attack being a good defence. Failing that, ignore the problem.
Back to civilisation, disseminate as widely as possible all the data you have before getting back to your life. Investigate and procure information on those you need protection from and if you thereafter think you're being brought in, don't bother playing by the rules. If they're thinking "the rules don't apply to me" then show them what it means when the rules of civilised conduct REALLY don't apply.
And if you have to preemt an attack, don't worry about getting big people, nor even the involved.
If Hollywood action movies have taught me anything, it's that the Big Bad ALWAYS thinks their family is out of harms way. If you're going to be boned, show them how wrong they are. Civilised actions preclude it, but like I said, they think those rules don't apply to them.
Make it so.
I doubt it's hard, technically to truly disappear. The hard part is that you have to be willing to leave absolutely everything behind.
Step 1: Phone off, battery out. If battery can't come out it gets destroyed.
Step 2: Wipe and leave behind anything that connects to the Internet.
Step 3: Turn everything into cash immediately.
You won't be able to hide that you're doing a runner, but you can make it harder to get your trail after you do run.
Get a hair cut, color hair (just 2 shades different, not drastic), add/remove facial hair, buy some cheap glasses frames with 0 correction glass in them. Buy entirely different wardrobe, half from Wal-mart, half from thrift stores.
A trip to Kinko's to print a temp set of fraudulent license plates for my car. Or better yet, swap plates with someone with the same model and color as mine. Or best give a buddy who looks like you $500 to drive the car to city X and fly back. You take the train/bus to city Y, in a different time zone from X and forget about the car.
After that it would depend on how much cash I had and how well connected the people after me wanted me. A good fake ID would be in the loop somewhere, but I honestly don't know anywhere to do that in person any more. Some time at cafés or public libraries with computers (and some attentive browser washing) would probably turn up something. Drive to a city chosen completely at random that I don't have any previous contact with. (No visits, family, friends, etc.) Population of at least 50K.
I'm not sure if I'd leave the country or not. (In this case I'm in the US.) It would require a better fake ID and borders are choke points of surveillance. Also fingerprints.
If I felt the need to send "I'm okay" information to my friends or family I'd do it through the post at least a 3 hour drive from where I've set up camp. No return address.
xyzzy
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Step 1: Post the video on YouTube. After that, too many people have seen it, and other than revenge, there's no good reason to come after me.
If that isn't an option, step one would be to publicly post my escape plan, then do something completely different.
The best overall solution is probably to try to get lost in a crowd:
If you're lucky, by the time they follow the trail of security camera breadcrumbs to your final subway stop, contact all the cab companies to find out if they picked up anybody near there, figure out where they took you, and check all the security cameras for all the transit hubs near there, you'll be across the border. If you're really feeling insane, buy an Amtrak ticket to a different destination on a different route (using a credit card with your real name) just before you head a different direction. As long as the platform is outdoors, it is unlikely that they'll be able to determine whether you did or did not get on that particular train, which might provide an additional delay.
Oh, yes, and as you're getting out of the cab, give a homeless person one of your credit cards. Make them chase a ghost.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
See The Partner.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
If you are going to disappear for a short period, get cash, live in a cash-only motel and contact nobody. A one-time cash withdrawl near home will not tip anyone off as to your location.
If you wanted off the grid completely, you are screwed. You have to have previous long-term plans in place to disappear (and 99% of your cash in the bank is not indicative of such planning). For medium term, take a trip to a country that speaks your second language, but not much English and go some place small, where another person from your country would stand out. Don't hide, go out, make friends. Let them know you think others are after you, they'll warn you if the time comes.
If the question is "how do I live indefinately looking over my shoulder",
Step 1. Drop all routine. Change your route to work daily. Vary your time of any activity by 10 minutes or more every day. Get a gun permit (gun optional, the permit will be found by those after you and cause them extra caution, but if you are comfortable, get the gun to go with it). If you get a gun, get 10. Check them daily. Get them all the same caliber. Keep 100 rounds on you at all times, and magazines stashed around with and separate from the guns.
Buy lots of the WiFi webcams and stream them to a local computer, as well as a cloud storage you have someone else buy on your behalf. Make sure to do both. Everyone stops when they find what they are looking for, except in the movies. If they find the local storage, they won't look for the cloud. If they track the cloud first, they won't look for the local. If you are overly worried about it, buy an old laptop and set it up, then tear down some sheetrock and put the laptop inside your wall, patch it up good, and they won't find it. Ever. Bodies were being found 50 years after mob murders in building sites so concealed. Get a UPS for the local computer and Internet so if your power is cut, you get recording.
Document what you saw, send it to your lawyer. And your family. Figure out why they are after you, and either work with them or against them until they have no more worries about what you know/saw.
Learn to love Alaska
I'll say it again in ickle words for the hard-of-thinking.
Disappear a bit.
They will lose track of you.
Disseminate your stuff before you get back on the radar.
If the delay between you doing this and them spotting you, then the damage is done. After that, the ONLY reason they will continue is if you embarrased some shitkicker. In which case, they obviously do not believe the rules apply.
In which case, go wild, do whatever you want. Because they will.
Read up on what "Total War" means and then apply it.
You know who's really asking this question, don't you? The cops are looking for somebody, and the trail went cold. So now, they're crowd sourcing "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego"
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Once in my magical girl outfit, I'd fight those evil men. I'd prolly scare them to death too.
That may not be the kind of fantasy you were looking for, though.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
If you accidentally witnessed something "strange" and believed that you were being followed in the real world, your actions should not and would not resemble what your character would do in a movie, and neither would "the government".
So posing the question to a bunch of nerds on the internet wouldn't make sense.
If you're a novelist looking to write some movie, however, and you run out of good ideas, you might ask Slashdot for a bunch of ideas for your story, posing your question in the way that was done in this story. That would certainly result in lots of ideas being generated by random strangers to fix your writer's block.
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
A handful of barbiturates and a quart of vodka.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, what this looks like is... *I am a student 'scenario writing', do my homework* kind of question.
I see a lot of those math-students on math forums as well, although this is the first scenario-writing-student-questions I've ever encountered though...
I hope it wont become a trend. Before you know it you'll have deja-vu's watching TBBT and QI.
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Ask Slashdot: What would your I just got back from the international spacestation and I want to go back to my wife and friends plan look like? :-)
You are in Kazakhstan and the bus driving you from the Kosmodrome to Moscow got hijacked by Sart separatists from Tajikistan in a bid to recreate their own sovereign state. You dont speak any Russian, nor any Turkic language, but you master US-style signlanguage. All your money is in the US, and you proved not to be such a good 'survival expert' as you once thought. Your friends nor your wife who you just married can help you and you're in a space-suit. and no normal clothing around...
Oh, and some jokes on physics are welcome. No McGuiver-is stuff please.
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Nice try buddy, but we aren't going to help you find John Connor!
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
Getting a birth certificate? No problem. Getting the social for that person? No problem.
Actually using that SSN? Incredibly risky. Part of the process of dying now is the local vital records office sending a record of your death to the Social Security Administration. The second you do anything to get that SSN reported to the feds, (like open a bank account, attempt to acquire credit, or get a paycheck), you are toast. At best, it'll come back that the SSN is invalid, and a normal life can be annoying. At worst, they'll pop you for ID theft.
When there was a chance that a child might not have yet acquired an SSN, that could work. Since now a record of every death goes to the SSA, that'll kill the SSN of pretty much every citizen upon death. (In fact, there are news stories every once in a while about how hard it is to convince the SSA that you aren't dead when somebody fat-fingers the wrong number or name into the database.)
That seems to be about Assange. You have a point there. If he actually did something wrong, he really messed up. I don't want to let him off the hook for sexual misbehavior just for Wikileaks' sake. If he did nothing wrong, that still provides a pretext for the authorities to go after him.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Then I'd do whatever jon katz did. I mean, nobody has heard of him lately.
Thats a remarkably tasteful answer. I was expecting a worse comparison, like Roland...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
A hollow voice says "Plugh."
"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
In today's housing market, you could finish your prison sentence before the house sells.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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...
My stepfather was a cop. When you actually know what you're talking about (instead of just casting aspersions) you'd know that transferring a prisoner that a cop doesn't actively want to transfer can easily get tied up in all manner of red tape. For example, if they charge you with jaywalking they can deny extradition until you've had your trial and served your sentence. Even if a competing jurisdiction has charged you with treason. When transfers aren't tied up in red tape, it still takes far more than making a claim and flashing a badge.
When you're not yet caught, the first guys to catch you own you. Pick well and then convince your choice that something stinks badly enough that they should fight to hold on to you until it can be cleared up.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Or rather read his autobiography 'Ghost in the Wires' to get a first hand account of how he managed to successfully change his identity and evade the authorities.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
On the other hand, if you are accepted in the Legion, you will have a fun time in places like Afghanistan, Djibouti or the Ivory Coast, to name a few. If you goal was to escape being shot at, you may want to reconsider.
Or, you could let the law determine the truth by following the due legal process.
As it is, a reasonable person might conclude that all that's needed to avoid Assange's fate is to keep one's pants on and generally stay out of trouble.
So what I'm hearing is that their goal is to make other political activists sexually frustrated...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"