StingRays. I love a good visit to the aquarium. The soothing darkness, the playful sea otters, the gulping anchovies? But these StingRays aren’t the kind you can gently pet in the kiddie corner of your local marine center.
These StingRays track cell phones, but that’s damn sure not all they do. They can also function like a substitute cell phone tower for your little device to ping away at to its delight. The cops can set one up, then access your phone’s serial number, location, and more—they can even block calls by disrupting the phone’s ability to connect to its service provider. The main thing you need to know is that it’s a tool the police use, and chances are you’ve even had those invisible signals shooting out of your phone go through one at some point. This technology is on the ACLU’s radar, because these devices sweep up information not just about their targets, but also any innocent bystanders whose cell phones happen to be within range of the police’s trick tower.
The good news is StingRays are usually only deployed if there’s a concern about terrorism, civil unrest, or both. Here are two simple tips to keep you out of the StingRay’s barbed grasp: don’t be a terrorist, and don’t riot. How hard is that? Just stay away from parades and Black Friday sales. And good God, whatever you do, do not be a rioting terrorist. That’s a sure ticket to getting busted in a big way.
Communication is still a necessity, even if it’s just for the most basic stuff. If modern electronic messaging of any kind is so at the mercy of ECHELONs and StingRays, what choice do you have? I can’t get too technical, but I can point you in the direction of some stuff that might get you where you want to go.
Know how I’ve been saying this is almost like being a spy? Here’s where the overlap is obvious. So come on, Mr. or Ms. Bond, let’s step into the shop where Q left his gear laying around and see what we can dig up to help you. Let’s double back a little to the subject of…
Never tweet! or snap, or pin, or whatever… It might be pretty outdated in a lot of ways now, but in the movie Hackers one character says, “You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That’s a typo. Orwell is here now. He’s livin’ large.”
That guy has a point and it’s truer now than ever. Hey, I know this is a theme, but there’s a gold-plated, indestructible reason it bobs back up again. Remember our case studies? The mystery dead guy on the Australian beach, Joey Newts, even Clark Rockefeller? None of them, not even the Clarkster, were in the same boat as you or me. See, unlike those mysterious characters, you and I are in an excellent position to have the Internet trip us right the hell into an 8 × 8 cell—even if you weren’t fleeing the criminal justice system in the first place. This is the most connected, chatty age imaginable. The age of the tweet. The age of endless photo albums digitally preserved for all eternity on Facebook, where perhaps one day our great-grandkids can go to find our lives memorialized every bit as boring as they seem right now.
Sure, it’s a glorious time! Gigantic databases of information everywhere, linked by glowing fiber-optic cables speeding information along at incredible speeds! Anything you need, at your fingertips. Give me my flying car and my robot maid, I’m all ready for this Jetsons kind of life.
Oh, no, wait—that all comes at a very steep price. If you want access to everything, you must allow yourself to be accessible, too. Anyone who has dropped off the grid and wants to stay gone has to take a very different tack when it comes to the Internet.
The idea of not using the Web at all is kind of weird. It also could conceivably set up an unfortunate attention-grabbing situation, where casual work acquaintances or neighbors figure out that woman in 3-A doesn’t seem to exist online, which sets off alarm bells. It’s okay to be a Luddite, as long as you’re believably Google-able.
We’ve chatted about how it’s mandatory that your old online life goes as dead as the poor soul whose social security number you’re currently using. That’s a given.
But say you need to have some kind of basic online presence, because even the most minimal lease agreement nowadays might have a line for “e-mail address.” It’s become one of those things people just automatically include on forms, presumably because no one likes to talk on the phone anymore.
Also, the Internet will remain incredibly valuable to you if you want to keep tabs on what’s going on with your old life. Not that you should! It’s safer to stay away, but supposing you glance through the online version of your local paper from time to time, there’s probably no harm—just don’t comment on any news stories. I don’t care if Mrs. Sarah Sabatini is claiming to have baked the most delicious pecan pie eight years in a row and you know it to be a fact that you held the blue ribbon at least twice in that range—bite your tongue, bite your fingertips, and close the page.
This all presents a problem, though, and that problem is spelled IP, or Internet Protocol Address. Every computer has an IP address, and it’s a string of digits that might look like this: 110.55.106.175 (that one’s fake). Depending on what Internet service you use—and several other factors—an IP can be traced right down to your front door.
I am not kidding. A killer in St. Louis once tried to taunt cops with an Internet map of the location of a victim’s body. The police ended up finding his IP and that led them straight to his Microsoft screen name. That bland-looking string of numbers can cause a whole world of hurt, the kind of hurt you can only plea-bargain down to an ankle bracelet, and that’s if you’re lucky.
Never fear, though! In this instance, the feared hackers of today have found creative ways to sidestep the Orwellian surveillance they were already onto when the movie Hackers came out.
If I’ve already spooked you enough about using the Internet, consider doing the following research from some kind of common-use public computer. Those can be found in various hotel lobbies (though they may require a guest password) and libraries, or used for a small sum at print shops like Kinkos. I’d elbow the covert masturbators out of the way and opt for the library, but your mileage may vary.
Onionize Your Online Life. I don’t even claim to understand how it works, but over the years, Internet geniuses have put together something called Tor, which stands for The Onion Router. What Tor actually does for you is dirt-simple and might be a relief to the nervous guy or gal on the run from a heap of troubles at home. Tor is free, downloadable software that that allows anyone who has it on their computer to do their work in complete and blessed anonymity. As best as I can understand, Tor’s network routes signals all over the world, until an Internet user’s identification and location have been completely obscured.
An argument in favor of getting your hands dirty with technical stuff and using Tor is pretty simple: criminals are really fond of it. All along I’ve assumed I’m talking to a mix of people—those fleeing legal woes and those who are just trying to get away from some kind of clear and present danger, which often involves terrible people (abusive spouses, creepy stalkers, people who compulsively suck their teeth in restaurants). Any of these would be well served by a software package that’s popular with online drug merchants, sellers of questionable documents (also relevant to our cause here!), and hackers themselves.
I’ve been told that Tor, sadly, isn’t perfect. Law enforcement and government agencies have learned in the last few years that if they park themselves at key points along Tor’s network, they may be able to identify some users.
However, knowing the way criminal justice enforcers prioritize what they do, I can almost guarantee that unless you are one seriously bad actor and your Internet habits are part of whatever files exist about you, chances are good they won’t have their bots hanging out looking for signs of you trying to anonymously purchase your favorite vintage train conductor overalls on eBay.
I began by instructing you, grasshopper: don’t tweet. I was serious about that. Listen, get your anonymity software. Set up a basic e-mail account that only receives, never sends. Go absolutely crazy with searching whatever you need to search to reassure yourself that whoever might be a little too curious about you is not actually on your trail, yet.
But let’s look at the temptation, the real snake in the garden of your new life free of old and possibly deadly entanglements. Temptation comes in the form of whatever social media venue tickles your attention-seeking fancy. If you are involved with social media when you realize it’s time to hightail it out of your old life, then I have some ugly reality for you: your new life needs to be about staying the hell off those accounts.
Why? Because we’re humans, and we are creatures of habit. I’m not just talking about consistently lusting for spicy mustard on our hot dogs, I’m talking about speech patterns. The way we actually construct sentences.
If you had a really popular social media account of some kind prior to bugging out and you did as instructed and let that drop, great. What you don’t want to give into is the impulse to start up something similar all over again, a lonely nobody this time, of course, but with the same unmistakable verbal flair. The Internet is full of intrepid amateur detectives who are spending their free time catching “catfish” and surfing the profiles of innocuous strangers.
Depending on how hard someone is searching for you, even your tendency to use the words “cromulent” and “perq” in casual conversation might trip you up. If you’re a highly prized fugitive for some reason—major bank robbery suspect, drug trafficker, and the like—federal investigators have a pretty deep bag of tricks to reach into, and it’s not crazy to think they could find you simply by analyzing anything you’ve posted on the Internet and then using tailored search strings to discover that mysterious nobody in Podunk, Idaho, who—wow, crazy coincidence—looks just like you.
The bottom line is this: keep the Internet shenanigans to the barest minimum possible. And when you have to do anything—it’s highly likely you still may have to conduct various financial activities over a computer, for example—hide behind whatever walls you can find. An unmonitored public computer you can type on with gloved hands, the Tor-obscured surfing software, whatever works.
It’s not all about computers and tablets though, is it? At some point, we have to talk to people. That’s a fact of life. So let’s go to church together, my friends. I’m about to induct you into…
I know that if you’ve been an avid consumer of detective novels, thrillers, cop dramas, you’ve heard of the burner phone. Just what the hell is a burner phone, after all, and is it even a real thing? Do you set it on fire after you use it? It’s real, and it could be your best friend. And you are not required to set it ablaze, no.
On a simple level, a burner phone is a prepaid cell purchased with cold, hard cash. No contract to worry about. You pick up some airtime cards (like what you’d buy to use a pay phone overseas), maybe $50 for a month, whatever the going rate is now, charge up the phone, and then use it for whatever.
It’s not fiction that our friends who society so judgmentally condemns as “the criminal element” are longtime users of burner phones. I have to admit, too, they are much more convenient than driving out to the last working pay phone wherever you live, if there even is an operable one anymore.
So, you’ve got a solid source of communication and even the cheapest phone probably has some basic ability to use the Internet—and then when you think the number may have run through one too many StingRay devices, just drop it in the trash as you’re exiting your local big box store with the box containing your next burner phone.
Of course, it’s wrong to assume a burner phone is only of use to those who want to keep phone calls related to their drug deals off their AT&T bill. The burner phone has completely—well, mostly—legitimate uses as well.
Acquiring funds is a continuing challenge, especially if the money you piled up to finance your life change was more molehill than mountain. It seems inevitable that before you can find some basic job in your new life, you might need to downsize. A pretty natural way of doing that these days might be some kind of anonymous ad on a Web site that specializes in classified postings.
What could be safer for something like that than a completely disposable phone number? Hell, you could put it right in the ad, in that case. Then once you’ve sold that pair of ski boots and the transaction is done, the phone number can conveniently flutter off to the dead phone number graveyard and your new pal won’t be able to invite you to tag along on any wintry adventures. Not to mention, no further hassles from the nosy, weird, or disgruntled buyers who found your posting a little too late.
Burner phones are incredibly useful to anyone on the dating scene, too. What better option to have at your disposal than a disposable phone if your new flame gets a little stalkerish? What if they suddenly realize you aren’t actually Kevin Costner or Jennifer Aniston’s hotter older sister? Flip that phone open and snap it right down the middle—there will no longer be a place for your suitor to file a complaint, and everyone can move on with their lives.
Burners are eminently practical solutions to a ton of problems. Coming back to how they might be relevant to our interests—well, you need to have some kind of phone number when applying for your low-key job in your new life, right? That’s a business application, in a way. Also, if you’re among that “criminal element” I mentioned before, you don’t really need me explaining burner benefits to you.
Buying the burner phone is a pretty simple affair. Some of those phones are so inexpensive now that casually dropping one in the trash doesn’t even feel like you’re throwing money away. There’s a catch here, though—some states legislators are getting wise to the burner phenomenon and beginning to put legislation in place that might require an ID even for your economical $9.99 clamshell. Hey, that’s fine if you have your well-made fake ID or a valid state card with your new name and address on it—except it still feels like an extra layer of information tracking that you might not want to deal with in your new life.
So is there another option, aside from burners? The answer is a measured “yes.”