Shedding Your Identity In the Digital Age 138
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kdawson
from the under-the-radar-sonar-and-lidar dept.
from the under-the-radar-sonar-and-lidar dept.
newscloud writes "Writer Evan Ratliff tells how he managed to hide from crowdsourced searchers for 27 days. The first person to find him and photograph him would claim a $5,000 prize. In addition to hiding out as a roadie with indy band 'The Hermit Thrushes' for a week, Ratliff donned a variety of increasingly impressive disguises. It's an interesting read on how to disappear in the digital age: 'August 13, 6:40 PM: I'm driving East out of San Francisco on I-80, fleeing my life under the cover of dusk. Having come to the interstate by a circuitous route, full of quick turns and double backs, I'm reasonably sure that no one is following me. I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there's no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught. About 25 minutes later, as the California Department of Transportation database will record, my green 1999 Honda Civic, California plates 4MUN509, passes through the tollbooth on the far side of the Carquinez Bridge, setting off the FasTrak toll device, and continues east toward Lake Tahoe. What the digital trail will not reflect is that a few miles past the bridge I pull off the road, detach the FasTrak, and stuff it into the duffle bag in my trunk, where its signal can't be detected. There will be no digital record that at 4 AM I hit Primm, Nevada, a sad little gambling town about 40 minutes from Vegas, where $15 cash gets me a room with a view of a gravel pile...' Spoiler alert: We previously discussed the denouement of the contest."
Hiding from the government is different. (Score:4, Insightful)
three words... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hiding from the government is different. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really not all that hard to avoid the police either. The biggest difference is that if you're hiding from the authorities you generally aren't too concerned with staying within the law while doing so, which opens up a lot of different options. For example, a bogus driver's license and social security number can go a long way & they aren't too hard to obtain if you are willing to break various laws.
As someone said, he basically had a neon sign on his head while doing this, and didn't end up getting caught despite all the efforts until he intentionally walked into a "trap" where he knew people would be looking for him. In addition, he kept most of his ties to his real life, where someone who was truly trying to disappear would have most likely not.
Hell, if he was really trying to go off the map, he could have just bought some camping gear and a month's worth of food rations and camped out in a remote location. Still, all in all it was an interesting experiment.
Re:You must remember (Score:2, Insightful)
"The average person can dissapear quite effectively from pretty much anyone except the govt or groups with similar power."
Actually you're wrong.
It's easier to disappear from the government than it is to disappear from a determined
person who is looking for you and doesn't care how much it costs or how long it takes.
All the government will typically do is wait for you to appear on a database, or
for some cop to run your info during a routine stop. But if you make sure you
don't drive a car, and you don't use anything which can be traced to you, you can
most assuredly hide for quite some time.
As any skip-tracer will tell you, what gets people caught when all else fails is that
they don't change their habits, despite the fact that they may have changed everything
else. So, if you used to go golfing a lot, or bet on horses at the race track, you have to
give all that up if you want to stay hidden. Essentially, you have to cut all ties to your
former life, and that includes "who you were" in terms of behavior. Most people will get
lazy or lonely and slack off on this, and that's when they get found.
Re:three words... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think that guy would be risking even being around an area thats populated enuf to have internet access let alone be logging on himself.
My bet is he is in some remote place using SNEAKER-NET with many relays each not knowing anything about the hops before or after their own relay to get info in and out.
You can't go down to the local internet-cafe being one of the most wanted and recognizable men in the world and expect some program like TOR to protect you.
Re:Getting careless... (Score:4, Insightful)
More like Ratliff wanted his life back and decided what he was getting paid wasn't worth it
Yeah. What if everybody lost interest and stopped looking, and he was stuck in Outer Nowhere, working in a warehouse.
"You mean nobody remembers my Round the World Walk?" - old cartoon from Punch, showing a guy in hiking gear in the lobby of a big London newspaper.
Re:You must remember (Score:3, Insightful)
There is plenty of intelligence sharing across borders these days. Some of it has cooperation at either end, some of it does not. Also the willingness to share depends entirely on the reward for sharing - money, politics, blackmail, good will, etc.
Those hops you're making through distant lands, in all probability there are logs on either side of the machine that can be massaged together to form a nice little picture of the next and previous hops. It might take a while, but if you communicate with your old life, chances are good that you'll get found if there is a big desire to find you.
That said, you can remain illusive for life as well, but you have to sever every single tie to your old life and start anew. The only person you can ever hope to trust enough is yourself in that regard. Sure you might have accomplices willing to buy throw away cell phones and such, but every extra brain in the mix is one that can give you up.
If you want to be sipping the German beer because you pissed off a village chief somewhere, then you have to give up the old life and maybe only ever speak of it on your death bed.
Re:Hiding from the government is different. (Score:3, Insightful)
and off the beaten path i.e. a small town. Keep a low profile
I'm trying to figure this out. How exactly are you going to "keep a low profile" in a small town, where virtually everyone knows everyone else? You'll always be "that stranger". IMO a large city is better for anonymity.
Re:You must remember (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree. The whole point of the Wired article this was attached to was on just how easy it is to disappear. According to the article (which is a fascinating read), the reason most folks get caught is because they don't fully distance themselves from their old lives. They eventually get lonely, bored, tired, and try to call or email someone, or use an old credit card. If you fully wanted to just "walk away", you could, but you'd have to really walk away. The point of the contest was more for fun and publicity. Like Whiteox said, he could have easily just sat in his mum's basement for a month, but that wouldn't have been any fun at all.
Re:I think if you're really trying to hide.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. If you're really trying not to be found, staying away from communities like twitter and facebook are just the start. Otherwise, you might as well shout "Here I am, Look at me!" from the rooftops.
So, as the guy says in TFA (which incidentally is one of the better reads I have come across on Slashdot):
Had I shown that a person, given enough resources and discipline, could vanish from one life and reinvent himself in another?
I would have to say no. Ratliff is obviously somewhat dependent on social engagement (which he admits as a source of stress), but there are many who are a lot more self-contained who would require less in the way of social interaction, who I think would stay below the radar for a lot longer.
Re:Hiding from the government is different. (Score:3, Insightful)
Us starting a war in Iraq instead of looking for him seems to have worked for him too.
Boring (Score:3, Insightful)
1. $5000 is not that much incentive. (Hell it wouldn't cover costs for a serious attempt. Many private investigators and bounty hunters wouldn't touch it). This would be much more valid a prize that would change someone's life - say $20 million.
2. People over-estimate the government's ability to track people down. Criminals seem to manage weeks, months or occasionally years in hiding. Mostly because the incentive for catching a petty criminal isn't all that great. Now if it were national secrets at stake that'd be different.
Hiding is not vanishing (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm rather surprised he got into a hostel, the one I tried in Venice Beach a while back demanded a passport instead of the valid ID that I presented - evidently the desk clerk didn't like my looks (I was a wandering longhair at the time) and I was denied service, just like you hear the old stories about lunch counters or the new stories about British soldiers.
PS the classic counter-surveillance technique is three right turns in a row. If the same car is still in your rearview mirror, you can be pretty sure they're following you. Detecting surveillance is one thing, evading it quite another. Of course, these days they just stick a GPS tracker on your car, which is why you need to go into an underground structure and change vehicles.
Re:Hiding from the government is different. (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth is that we don't really know how successful police really are at "catching their man".
For all the fancy "Police investigation" TV Series where the good guys always end up getting the bad guys, in the Real World the only feedback we get comes from the media, and while they will happily publish news of the kind "Dangerous Murderer Caught" they don't exactly tend to publish news of the kind "Five Years Past And Dangerous Murderer Still Loose".
Broad statements about how the police always catches their man when sufficiently motivated probably result of an outsider perception which was build upon from an information flow where successes are loudly celebrated while continuous failure is hidden and silent.
Re:You must remember (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. It's pretty easy to disappear. Don't go out where you'll be seen. Give traces where you aren't.
You know, it's not very hard to send a trusted friend your credit card and cell phone, and tell him "Use the card every few days to pull out $40, and deposit the cash once a month at a different branch.. Call your girlfriend/house/friend from my cell every few days just to chat."
Depends on how badly they want you vs how badly you want to stay hidden... "JWSmythe (446288), in this bag we have one of your girlfriends fingers. In 9 days she will run out of fingers. Please get in touch with us.". s/girlfriend/someone_else_you_care_about as required.
I hope I never have to stay hidden from someone who wants me at any cost.
Re:You must remember (Score:3, Insightful)
He seemed to have a need to keep track of the people tracking him, and he certainly got sloppy with tor.
You know, if the police were after you, and you had a police band scanner, or some other way to see what the police were doing in their efforts to track you down, I think you wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to use it. A lot.
Re:Hiding from the government is (not) different. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a clear difference between hiding if people know who you are
and getting away with murder if the police does not know you're the one they're looking for.
Re:Hiding from the government is different. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most crimes go unsolved, whether it's your bike, someone breaking into your house, even murder. Many "solved" crimes are unsolved; Former Illinois Governor (now Federal prisoner) George Ryan stopped the death penalty in Illinois when it was found that half the men on Illinois' death row were innocent -- the real killers were (and are) still free.
Note the last line in this news story [sj-r.com] and many others: "No arrests were made immediately following the attacks." Ther still haven't been any arrests.
Re:Boring (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the ABILITY of the government. It's the MOTIVATION. The two-bit conman who ripped me off is still at large, even though he had a long criminal record before he ripped me off, and doubtless a long record afterward. But, I bet if he shot the mayor's dog, he'd be in jail the next day.
Re:I think if you're really trying to hide.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. After reading the article, it looks like he was completely obsessed with keeping track of the trackers (which makes sense if his boss didn't give him real work to do).
He also was obviously trying to get caught towards the end there. I mean seriously, who adds a pizza place their facebook? Especially when 'on the lam' as it were.
Lessons learned here? Don't act like a tool. Don't spend all your time on twitter and facebook trying to leave breadcrumbs. If you use Tor, use it all the way. Don't get bored and obsessive.
Of course, as the comments pointed out, that would have made it boring as a challenge - he'd never have been found.