How hard is it to shed one’s skin in the age of Facebook and Twitter, and how do investigators track down the thousands of people who do this each year? In the September issue of Wired magazine, contributing editor Evan Ratliff wrote a story about disappearing in the digital age.
When the magazine hit newsstands on August 15, Evan took off, too. Wired offered $5,000 to anyone who could find him, with $3,000 going to Evan if he made it a month undiscovered. To make the hunt fair, I had access to all of Evan’s credit-card, bank and personal accounts, and I posted his transactions and e-mails online. Meanwhile, Evan was required to act like a person who really wanted to start his life over again: He had to create false accounts online, stay in cities and live in a way he would if truly starting life anew.
Summing up the hunt
What followed Evan’s disappearance was the most fun journalistic experience I’ve ever participated in. Evan began by leaving a few clues about his location: He sold his car in Las Vegas, pulled money out of an ATM in Santa Monica and even snuck into an interview on Venice Beach with Sometimes Daily.
Meanwhile, the hunt grew. The Facebook group devoted to finding Evan expanded to about 1,000 members and a counter group was formed, with people in it conspiring to keep him hidden. Fake Evans appeared online, fake photos of his travels appeared on Flickr, his friends talked to hunters just the way they would talk to private investigators, clues began to pile up, moles sabotaged real hunters. And a few non-Evan Evans were spotted too.
Eventually the hunters, congregating on Twitter and IRC channels, had created a remarkably detailed profile of Evan — from what he liked to do, to what he liked to eat. Meanwhile, the brilliant Mike Selinker fromLone Shark Games (aka @dusky_wireworm) planted clues that the hunters were sometimes able to solve incredibly fast, and other times, not so fast. He even once stumped his wonderful colleague, Teeuwynn Woodruff, who was helping to lead the hunt but who wasn’t given any inside information.
With just 10 days to go until Evan collected his prize, things started heating up. He was almost captured at a soccer game in Salt Lake City. Then, thanks to some clever sleuthing by someone with connections at Delta, nearly nabbed in the Atlanta airport. Meanwhile, without Evan knowing it, Jeff Reifman at newscloud had uncovered his aliases and was hot on his trail. By late this past weekend, Jeff and a team of other trusted hunters were closing in and had tracked him to Louisiana.
Last weekend, Evan, a betting man at heart, agreed to follow a set of challenges and to do a series of things that had been planted in the coming week’s New York Times crossword puzzles. The first was to “attend a book reading,” a relatively easy thing to do in secret — unless you’ve already been tracked to New Orleans.
And that was Evan’s downfall. Reifman had followed Evan digitally, and then he called the people at Naked Pizza (whose store Evan’s secret avatar, @gatzjd, had followed on Twitter) who alerted all their delivery people. With their help, Reifman staked out the city, and eventually caught Evan as he headed into a reading.
It was an amazing experiment in what privacy means in the digital age (and how much Google knows about us!), how hard it is to escape one’s identity online and how to track people. It was also an experiment for Evan in what it’s like to try to start life as someone new.
And that’s a story — along with all the secret details of how he hid and was hunted — that will be told at length in the December issue of Wired. So stay tuned. Evan is compiling stories from the hunters and interviewing the people who were on his tail. In a short while, we’ll all know everything that happened and a lot of what he thought while he was on the run.
The post Vanished and Captured: Recapping the Hunt for Evan Ratliff appeared first on Vanish.
