There are different motives for people thinking about disappearing. Disappearing me also means different things. It may mean disappearing from social media, disappearing from a particular community, or to full on get off the grid. The usual reasons for wanting to disappear are to eliminate fear. Just some typical scenarios are battered women who don’t know how to escape from a violent relationship, or those afraid of being stalked, or those being cyber attacked, or those afraid of violent criminals, or maybe you’re a whistleblower, or you’re being targeted by a government for your political beliefs.

The reasons can vary, but the important thing to understand is that depending on who the threat is and their level of power, then the approach can be dramatically different because of the tools available to the threat source. Okay, spoiler alert. Disappearing successfully can only be done with preparation. You have to prepare people around you, prepare your tools, prepare your methods before you even think about doing this. Doing a panic action of trying to disappear will fail.

So this is the irony of it all. In order to have the option to disappear in the future, you must have a plan today before you have a need to ever disappear. We will analyze the problem more from the viewpoint of people looking for you. You will see why when you think only of your own methods, without concern for what a smart adversary will look for, that your chances of failure are almost absolute.

There are other videos from experts to know about physical evasion, but my particular expertise is tech. I know how tech tracking is done. If you want to have the knowledge of how to disappear in case you need it, then stay right there. As I said earlier, disappearing is something you plan for. It is not something you can do at the spur of the moment in panic. If you have never made moves to think about this possibility, then you cannot disappear successfully.

You have to assume that whoever will be looking for you will understand human behavior and will seek to look for holes in your methods. And these holes will be based on your lack of discipline. You have seen movies where a couple of protagonists are being chased around the city. Let’s say a man and a young teenage girl, and a teenage girl cannot help but hide a phone on her person.

And for drama of course, the teenage girl makes a phone call to some friend and the location is exposed. Of course the more up to date tech is that the phone will be tracked anyway, even without making a call. Anyway, this desire to connect to family and friends is the most common point of failure and I will generalize the issue here. The way to find you is to wiretap or surveil all the people you know.

The obvious way of surveillance is via the phone of course, and even if you use a burner phone, the tracking will be done on all your contacts, particularly other family members. Someone searching for you will look for clues showing heightened activity with particular people. In the intelligence community, they call this noise. Anything out of pattern like going to the bank more often or making extra calls or unusual behaviors will indicate that you’re trying to contact certain people.

And thus, you will be found through them. So to set this up to prevent this failure, like a movie scenario, you will need to always plan in advance. The planning includes communicating with contacts and family that includes a discussion of disappearance strategies. If you intend to disappear, there must be no obvious contact. This is pretty hard to do. And this is the discipline that always causes failure. You must not be weak here.

I will tell you how to initiate a planned contact later where it will not be obvious and will not raise alerts to someone looking. But just think about this. No obvious contacts. Let me go through some basic physical preparatory steps that you need to plan for in order to at least get a successful early attempt at disappearing. These are the physical things that are part of your plan.

I’m just going to go through these quickly. Later on, I will concentrate on tech things that help with a longer term like communicating with people. And now we’ll spend more time on those. First of all, you need to have cash. You cannot have any trace. You don’t want hotel rooms and car rentals showing up on credit card records. And this is a piece that requires obvious preparation. In today’s world, hardly anyone is cash.

So you will need to have standby cash at all times in case you have to do something unplanned. Cryptocurrency could be helpful in the long run. However, I caution you against using crypto wallets that have KYC or your ID on it like a Coinbase. This can easily be tracked like any bank account. Crypto at least gives you a long term source of money. The problem is that not everyone will take crypto, but at least it’s a way of surviving.

There are definitely a good number of businesses that take crypto, especially Bitcoin, that can open up avenues of financial access. Still difficult, but at least survivable. The easiest way to track you is via a car. Nowadays license plate readers are on the freeway. There are many facial recognition machines and intersections triggered by car moving violations. This is a big no no. Unless you have some secret bug out vehicle, the only way out from your current location is public transportation.

It should be clear here that if you’re having to walk and use public transportation, that you really can’t be carrying a lot of personal belongings. So you have to have a quick grab bag of things. In fact, you should think about this in advance. What would you need with you? This is obviously hard to do quickly, but in today’s tech environment, facial recognition is everywhere and you can easily be found.

But facial recognition software often focuses on the eyes, nose, mouth and facial shape. Things like sunglasses, hats and facial hair make those fail. Maybe your choice of clothes that you bring with you should reflect this advanced thought of your appearance. Now this part is hard to generalize and there has to be a lot of thought given to this. If you can leave the country, you will have a lot more options and you can show ID and it won’t matter once you are in a new country.

But if that’s not an option, then I recommend going far. And the reason for this is that the further you go, the bigger the population in the search grid and the more of a spec you become. Makes me wonder actually if some of those people who are homeless in big cities are examples of people running away but had no plan. And so they disappear as homeless in the streets.

Unless you are going abroad where you have to show your passport, you must never show an ID in any situation. You have to avoid that at all costs. You must think of a different identity and maybe quickly come up with a backstory about where you are from. Getting closer to real life is often good because it’s harder to forget and harder to be inconsistent. This strategy also includes never using credit cards.

In fact, don’t bring any. You must stay only in places that accept cash. This clearly leads to being in city environments so that’s why a bit of planning is important. Maybe smaller towns will be safer and probably cheaper. Now this is the part I really want to focus on and this is really tied to the technology you should be using if any. You can be completely off the grid and have no computers and phones but just limits your actions and your ability to communicate when seeking help.

So I would plan to be equipped with the right set of tools. My opinion on this has changed recently before I would have said that I would trust a computer primarily and avoid any kind of phone. But after more careful thought I realized that the Google phones are probably the safest devices of all if it doesn’t have a SIM card. Just like your computer. The reason I say this is because a d Google phone has protections to hide the identity of the device.

In fact, without a SIM card a phone with a d Google OS really doesn’t emit any identifiers. The device itself is not addressable externally from an outside attack without some way of identifying it like with an MZ or IMEI. Two elements which are hidden by the d Google OS. But a computer on the other hand has the hardware identifiers and OS identifiers like the Microsoft product ID or CPU ID for example which are easily seen and detected by some apps.

In fact, how can we ever be sure that these aren’t recorded by browsers since they are so easily acquired? So a way to make a computer safe is to always use Linux only and then only operate from a virtual machine. This way you can always reset the machine to a known state as well as hiding device identifiers. Next thing I would think about is how to reach the internet.

Frankly in a dire situation where you want to disappear I don’t think there’s a choice but to use only Tor for networking. I’m sure something that Snowden would always use. I would imagine that Snowden would use a Linux distro like tails in a non-persistent state. But I don’t think we need to go this far unless the opposition is a three letter agency. It is extremely important not to use a normy phone like an iPhone or Google Android.

Even without a SIM card these devices will allow someone to track you directly. These devices can reveal your location even when off. And there’s where preparation is needed. You should always be using the right kind of phone since you cannot change phone at the last minute. As I said earlier the threat sources will attempt to find you by looking for elevated noise levels. If the behavior of a person you contact changes and it is someone you have known in the past then someone will look at that as a clue that this contact is talking to you.

This is why you must have the discipline at the beginning especially to have minimal contact. No phone calls obviously since phones can be tracked. No SIM cards. It is pointless using burner phones since the threat will be wiretapping anyone you call. The better way to communicate is surptitiously and silently with no voice. In case you didn’t know there’s a voice print capability which can identify your voice anywhere on the phone network or the internet.

So voice is very dangerous just like facial recognition. Here’s an example method of silently leaving a message. Let’s say this to your family. If you’re spousing you share a password manager then you can both go to the same apps. You could for example go to the spouse’s email account and type a message but not send it over email SMTP instead just leave it in the drafts folder. It would be obvious to anyone checking their email that there is something in the drafts folder.

It would be invisible to the outside since there’s no network mail traffic that leaves the server. I call this a mail drop method. This is because both parties are just leaving messages in one spot. One login. The imagery in the old analog days was when someone leaves a message in some inconspicuous hole in a wall and you pick up messages from the same spot on the wall. All we’re doing here is using a digital version of this mail drop by sharing a single login to some account and leaving basically messages to yourself.

By the way you should delete messages immediately after reading it. You can do this once and then switch to another mail drop method. Again one account on some platform and leave messages to yourself. When habits of people change or when suddenly a bunch of people are switching to secure messaging apps or suddenly everyone is using Tor or a VPN the short term change is noise. It’s suspicious but here’s where planning makes it different.

If your contacts are already using secure messaging apps all the time and are already using a VPN or Tor then nothing will signal increase activity. This is the kind of preparation I advocate. Just like sharing a password manager opens up a lot of avenues. But still even if there are ways of communicating the key advice for the short term is actually to have hardly any communications. Keep changing the mail drop platform and keep messages brief.

Not to do because we are humans and we feel this guilt but for the safety of all including your family the best solution is actually for you to accept that complete disappearance if possible is the best option. It should be obvious here too that you should never log into any existing account in any social media as that would be the first thing I would check if I were the opposition.

Traces of traffic would narrow down your location. Think about it you’re staying in some motel that takes cash. How many motels will be in an area that takes cash once the town you’re in is identified. If you examine the big picture of the methods I describe here you can see that this is something you should have already discussed with family. If something happens don’t expect communications expect mail drop kind of messaging but very brief do not expect phone calls.

Be careful with movement since your family will be watched any noticeable change in habits will be detected. So you see it really is about thinking about everything in advance. You have to be thinking hard about each unique situation. There’s a certain time period right after you make a decision to disappear that no red alerts have yet been triggered. So here’s a time to see if a friend can drive you to a distant location like another state to give you a head start then you can take public transportation from there.

This will be better than a delay caused by taking public transportation from your original city which could be a bottleneck. Stone and for example managed to go to Hong Kong before his absence was detected. He was able to take a normal flight out. This is very important to really plan on. Once you’ve disappeared you must absolutely never log into all the accounts on any platform. Even the draft email solution I mentioned earlier you should likely be only used once and just to pass the next platform and new credentials to use.

You must change your identity on any platform you use. You will have some difficulty with some platforms because of two of the requirements meaning having a phone number. Here a solution is a Brax Virtual Phone. It will be used only for incoming text to a face and to an unknown identity. At least to an outsider it will not be attached to any person. This is key everywhere. You must not make the mistake of connecting your actions to the actions of a person being hunted down.

You can basically never get a SIM card. Some tips will seem obvious to me. You would be foolish to go to platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The surveillance capabilities on meta is out of this world. Here’s another fear that I have that you really need to be aware of. I explained that phones are now set to use the phone’s AI to recognize things on the phone. For example Apple could trigger every phone in the world to search for a face using this feature called client-side scanning.

All the iPhones in the world would search for every photo taken to see if your face exists even in a background in the crowd like in a public location. This is such a scary potential now that most people don’t realize. It means you cannot just hide from building cameras. Every mobile phone around you can be controlled by an opposition. This means you need to seriously change your appearance in the long term as there is no place you can go to that is not within the reach of phone AI doing client-side scanning.

There are tons of details in the general statements I’ve said here. I could probably expound on one technique for an entire video like client-side scanning issues or the mail drop technique or the dangerous identifiers in each device or the location trackers. Depending on your interest to this kind of content I will listen and develop more in connection with this topic. Please don’t hesitate to leave comments about this so I know if this is worth doing.

Folks we have a platform where people interested in privacy come and get educated and discuss issues like this. This is on Braxme. On this platform I also have a store with products that are important tools for privacy and actually for disappearing. This includes the Google phones which we discussed in this video, Brax Virtual phones which is a SIM-free phone solution, Identity-free email with Brax mail and our VPN service by its VPN.

These products will help you manage your identity on the internet and even help you disappear if need be. Thank you for watching and see you next time. .

See more of Rob Braxman Tech on their Public Channel and the MPN Rob Braxman Tech channel.