How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace Review

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How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace ReviewA book such as How to Disappear : Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace, scores very high on the cool factor. Ultimately though, it's one of those books that details things you should not try at home.

Author Frank Ahearn is a professional skip tracer; which is a person who locates other people. The term comes from the word skip being used to describe the person being searched for, and comes from the idiomatic expression to skip town, meaning to depart, perhaps in a rush, and leaving minimal clues behind for someone to trace the skip to a new location. Often these people are wanted by the government, family, spouses, or other authorities.

The book is touted as the "authoritative and comprehensive guide for people who seek to protect their privacy, as well as for anyone who's ever entertained the fantasy of disappearing - whether actually dropping out of sight or by eliminating the traceable evidence of their existence". Those are a number of very different goals.

For those who seek to protect their daily privacy in the physical world, the book provides a lot of good, high-level insights.

Since the author admits he isn't a technology expert, the book doesn't offer significant input on how to ensure online privacy, short of saying that one shouldn't use social media. Readers wanting to protect their online privacy can use effective resources such as CDT's Guide to Online Privacy for such topics.
Most people want to protect their privacy, and while many do entertain a fantasy of simply disappearing, the reality is that true disappearance is extraordinarily difficult and fraught with risk.
At 197 small pages, the book is a quick read and covers all of the key points. The book does have a lot of good details, but isn't the definitive text, as the devil is in the details, and many of those details are missing in the book. The person who truly wants to disappear would need an expert like Ahearn to work with them, rather than simply relying on the book alone.

The danger in a book like this is that it may lead someone to attempt to disappear on a whim. That is a great way to get themselves in a fine mess, often ending up in more trouble than before their aborted disappearance attempt.
The book focuses on 3 key areas: misinformation (destroying all the data known about you), disinformation (creating fake trails) and reformation (act of getting you from origination to destination without leaving any clues).
Some of the books ideas are similar to the federal witness protection program. In the federal program, witnesses are encouraged to keep their first names and choose last names with the same initial in order to make it easier to instinctively use the new identity.
Like the federal witness program, the books notes that in order to prevent the possibility of someone being followed, they should use a convoluted and indirect transportation path before finally reaching the location where they will live under the new identity. This path often involves a long chain of seemingly random routes which are intended to be difficult for a skip tracer to find or anticipate.

The book includes numerous stories of real-world scenarios in which Ahearn was involved with, and shows how to avoid their mistakes.
Many people envision disappearing as being on a beach with endless beers. Ahearn paints a reality involving endless use of disposable cell phones, cash cards, and remote mail boxes. But that is a lonely existence most people don't seem ready for.
Can someone really change themselves? Yes, but it's very expensive and difficult to hide without changing your identity and you certainly cannot hide from the government without changing your identity. The book is ultimately for someone who has a lot of money, as there is no way to create a new life on the cheap.
The book doesn't detail how to create a completely new identity in a new location, something that seemingly only a witness protection program can do, and mainly is about leaving false trails so that those looking for you can't find you.

For the person contemplating disappearing, they must ask themselves if they really want to live a life of endless prepaid phone cards and prepaid credit cards, using only free wireless and disposable USB memory cards as the book suggests. The book is about ensuring that one's old life and new life don't connect. After a few months of that, most people will likely be quite lonely.
The author notes that most people want to disappear for two main reasons: danger or money. Some people deal with stalkers, abusive ex-spouses or someone who came into money and doesn't want friends or family to locate them.
In a recent interview, Ahearn suggested New Zealand is one of the best places to disappear, as it's a long way off and has great beaches, is an English-speaking country and it's easy to acclimate to life there. But for a lifelong Red Sox fan do they really want to root for the New Zealand Warriors rugby team? Does the person understand the cold reality of vegemite?
Ultimately this is an interesting, but impractical book for the vast majority of people. Can one disappear? Perhaps, but it's getting harder, even with an expert like Ahearn. Perhaps the biggest deterrent should be Google StreetView. Even if one moves far away, StreetView is there, ready to announce your location to the world.

For most readers How to Disappear : Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace will be an entertaining book that does have valuable information.
Ultimately, for those considering disappearing, they need to understand the implications of loudly shutting the door on their way out of society. They should contemplate that before they take a course of action they are likely going to regret.
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The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom Review

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The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom ReviewIn The Net Delusion, Morozov positions himself the ultimate Net "realist," aiming to bring a dose of realpolitik to discussions about how much of a difference the Net and digital technologies make to advancing democracy and freedom. His depressing answer: Not much. Indeed, Morozov's book is one big wet blanket on the theory that "technologies of freedom" can help liberate humanity from the yoke of repressive government.
Morozov clearly relishes his skunk at the garden party role, missing few opportunities to belittle those who subscribe to such theories. If you're one of those who tinted your Twitter avatar green as an expression of solidarity with Iranian "Green Movement" dissidents, Morozov's view is that, at best, you're wasting your time and, at worst, you're aiding and abetting tyrants by engaging in a form of "slacktivism" that has little hope of advancing real regime change. The portrait he paints of technology and democracy is a dismal one in which cyber-utopian ideals of information as liberator are not just rejected but inverted. He regards such "cyber-utopian" dreams as counter-productive, even dangerous, to the advance of democracy and human freedom.
Much of the scorn he heaps on the cyber-utopians is well-deserved, although I think there are far fewer of them around than Morozov imagines. Nonetheless, there certainly is a bit too much Pollyanna-ish hyper-optimism at play in debates about the Net's role in advancing liberation of those peoples who are being subjected to tyrannical rule across the planet.
But Morozov simply doesn't know when to quit. His relentless and highly repetitive critique goes well overboard. We can all agree that technology is just one of many tools that can be harnessed to keep the power of the State in check or advance important civic / charitable causes; other factors and forces play an even more important role in promoting democracy and, in particular, ending tyranny. Yet, in his zeal to counter those who have placed too great an emphasis on the role of information technology, Morozov himself has gone too far in the opposite extreme in The Net Delusion by suggesting that technology's role in transforming States or politics is either mostly irrelevant or even, at times, counter-productive.
The more profound problem with Morozov's thesis is that, if he is correct that the Net poses such risks, or undermines the cause of democracy-promotion, isn't the logical recommendation that flows from it technology control or entertainment repression? He never really makes it clear how far he'd go to put the information genie back in the bottle since he simply refuses to be nailed down on specifics int he book. But his tone throughout the book -- speaking of the Net as "a great danger," and "a threat" with many "negative side effects" -- seems to suggest that some form of technological control or information repression may be necessary.
Morozov is on somewhat stronger footing in highlighting the paradoxical danger of voluntary information exposure in an age of ubiquitous digital connectivity and communications. But let's say it is true that social networking tools and other digital technologies which allow greater online personalization and socialization also potentially facilitate increased government surveillance by the State. What are we to do about that? Again, he doesn't really say.
He also scores some points for rightly pointing to the hypocrisy at play in the United States today -- by both government and corporations --" when it comes to the promotion of Net freedom globally. American leaders in both government and business need to better align their actions with their rhetoric when it comes to the interaction of government and technology. Too often, both groups are guilty of talking a big game about the Internet and freedom, only to later take steps to undermine that cause. But, strangely, he continues on to suggest that we should simply get used to the increasing politicization of the Net, even though it's unclear how that would help his cause.
To summarize, Morozov is quite right about the excessive euphoria currently surrounding the relationship of the Net to politics and regime change, but I think he's gone a bit overboard in The Net Delusion.
[My complete review of Morozov's "Net Delusion" can be found on the Technology Liberation Front Blog]The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom Overview

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