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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.
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 /.
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
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.
xyzzy
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
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"?
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!”
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
- Bus into town, taxi to real bus station, bus anywhere.
I would imagine they would expect you to take public transportation.
Moreover, if I have to travel by bus, just shoot me here.
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 /
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
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...
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.
The US extradition treaty with Sweden has some very curious provisions. See this commentary by a lawyer. Section VI b of the supplement to extradition treaty, in force since 1984, states that:
So, in force of this particular clause, once in Sweden Assange may well be quickly aquitted of the trumped-up rape charges, then sent to the Guantanamo concentration camp, and the US government may keep him there indefinitely "pending prosecution" along with hundreds of illegally detained political and war prisoners. Note that section VI b makes no mention whatsoever of the conditions in which Assange would be detained, nor does it specify any time limit for the prosecution. Even if Sweden requested the US to return Assange, the US would likely just ignore the request once they have Assange in their hands, citing national security concerns.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y