I wish it were organized in terms of utility relative to difficulty. Walking everywhere with a hat and buzz cut to avoid shedding hair is kind of insane and is more likely to attract attention than prevent you from being tracked by your DNA.
Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)
31–40 of 107 posts
Re: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)
#32I wish it were organized in terms of utility relative to difficulty. Walking everywhere with a hat and buzz cut to avoid shedding hair is kind of insane and is more likely to attract attention than prevent you from being tracked by your DNA.
There definitely seem to be a mix of useful information and big brother paranoia. Instructions on how to kill a police dog sent to track you? Yeah, this is blurring from 'escape your shitty life' and into 'escape a dystopian enforcer squad'
Re: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)
#33I really enjoyed this article just because it reminds me so much of the early internet: wall-to-wall libertarian derangement. UCC 1-207. Sovereign Citizenship. And it got slashdotted by this link. Really takes me back.
Re: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)
#34A nitpick (beyond the spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors throughout): The part about "most states in the Union require 24 hours before reporting a missing person" is nothing but a Hollywood trope. The fact is, most agencies require a missing person to be entered into their respective state's database within a few hours of the report. I can say unequivocally that Georgia has a two-hour window, as I've entered m…
The scope of the operation also grows exponentially (or was it quadratically?) with time. Scent trails and tracks decay quickly, and at a fixed rate of travel the area in which the subject can be grows as time^2 (the area of a circle). At 2mph after 1 hour your subject is within an area of roughly 12 square miles. After 24 hours that area is more than 7000 square miles. So agencies are generally interested in process…
> Scent trails and tracks decay quickly
This is generally only an issue when it's a case of a missing-endangered subject; most missing persons reports are of a routine[1] nature (spouse is delayed in travel and can't be reached; child has run away for the third time that month). Having a blanket policy that requires timely entry of all reports will cover every scenario, especially since an otherwise routine missing person report can turn into an emergency situation after the initial report is made.
> incidents likely to resolve themselves
That's true, and the vast majority of missing persons reports I entered over a 14 year span were canceled within hours or at most, days, when the missing person returned of their own volition. But the ones who are found safe only as a result of the timely report stand in defense of the policy.
[1] Just as there is no such thing as a "routine" traffic stop and therefore officers should always be alert, there is actually no such thing as a "routine" missing person report either; but for the sake of this discussion, by "routine" in this case I mean "not urgent or endangered".
Re: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)
#35If you want to disappear, maybe you should do it in a place other than America, so that you will not need to so thoroughly marginalize yourself (panning for gold?!).
Re: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)
#36Rather interesting, though, the scope is limited to USA alone. Supposing you make your way out of USA, a good solution for restarting your life is to join the French Foreign Legion. They'll take recruits from 17.5 - 39.5 years old. No questions asked, for a year. You literally start with a new name, an assumed identity which is a sign-up requirement. Their tagline is "the school of second chance." You get fed, you ge…
This is completely inaccurate. They are highly selective and flooded with ex military from 3rd world countries. So a pudgy middle class westerner would have problems. There's a reddit AMA and a Vice article about it if you google. Also,it takes years before you get the citizenship.
Re: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem is not in that the cap might be hot in itself (it even might not be), but that the action of removing the cap will relieve the pressure inside the coolant plumbing and as boiling point of fluids in dependent on pressure, the super-heated coolant will boil off violently. Few years ago when I was changing thermostat on my car, the thermostat itself was not significantly hot in itself, but other parts of the coo…
That's not exactly what I was referring to, although I wasn't being very clear. This is the part I was talking about: > The fluid will be quite painful resulting in first and second-degree burns. It's not likely to be disfiguring but if you accidentally burn yourself, you can very well go ahead with your plan to escape however your mind might be focused entirely upon the pain and not upon escape. Author seems to be o…
I definitely got what you are saying, and as I read the article I was fighting the urge to proofread it and email the corrections to the author. Given the rambling nature and random paranoia, I get the feeling such corrections wouldn't be warmly received.
Re: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)
#38A nitpick (beyond the spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors throughout): The part about "most states in the Union require 24 hours before reporting a missing person" is nothing but a Hollywood trope. The fact is, most agencies require a missing person to be entered into their respective state's database within a few hours of the report. I can say unequivocally that Georgia has a two-hour window, as I've entered m…
It's a trope with a basis in fact - that used to be the standard until relatively recently. I have had occasion to file 2 missing person reports and both times I was told on my first call that the person hadn't been gone long enough to justify a report. Both incidents were >10 years ago and obviously things have changed since then.
Re: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)
#39A nitpick (beyond the spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors throughout): The part about "most states in the Union require 24 hours before reporting a missing person" is nothing but a Hollywood trope. The fact is, most agencies require a missing person to be entered into their respective state's database within a few hours of the report. I can say unequivocally that Georgia has a two-hour window, as I've entered m…
Fantastic info. Thanks for sharing that.
Re: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace (2012)
#40I really enjoyed this article just because it reminds me so much of the early internet: wall-to-wall libertarian derangement. UCC 1-207. Sovereign Citizenship. And it got slashdotted by this link. Really takes me back.
I was just thinking that while reading this and enjoyed it for much the same reason. Everything about this page - the loose writing style, the borderline paranoia (although, given the subject, perhaps not without reason) and the antiquated - but perfectly readable - layout. It just screams early Internet. You can even pull up the source code and tell that, more than likely, it's hand edited.
It's like stepping back into the mid-90s, one of those random pages you might land on one morning at 3am - and you waited for it to slowly load on your 9600 baud modem.
Add an "under construction" sign and it would have been complete. :)