Ask Slashdot: What Would Your 'I've Got To Disappear' Plan Look Like? 789
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."
Remove myself as single point of failure (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
How to Steal an Identity (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
You're a slashdotter all right. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
How "disappear" do you want? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Nope, not kidding, you just didn't read. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Simple enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Assange reference I assume (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:WWAD (Score:4, Interesting)
How exactly interrogating one of the parties is redundant? Ecuador offered the Swedish officials an opportunity to do just that and enter their embassy to question Assange. They refused. If their objective was to find the truth to access if they should press charges they would have accepted, that obviously wan't the case here. They are not even remotely interested in the truth.
Oh, and yes, suspects can often choose the place and circumstances of their interviews if they are not charged with anything, which is the case here. They can even refuse to say anything in most countries.
You can side with anyone you like that doesn't mean you are right, and yes, a crime whose maximum sentence is two years, which is seldom if ever applied by judges, and is almost always commuted to a year of communitary services, is a minor offence,
Re:WWAD (Score:5, Interesting)
The US extradition treaty with Sweden has some very curious provisions. See this commentary by a lawyer [internatio...onblog.com]. Section VI b of the supplement to extradition treaty [wordpress.com], 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.