hostess: the impetus for tonight's programis an exhibition called "the talent show" which is currently on view in the target galleryuntil august 15th. through works that span from the 1960's 'tiltoday, the show examines the complicated relationships that have emerged between artists and viewersover the past half century and puts these concerns in the spot light of contemporaryculture that is awash in information.
Alaska Airlines Credit Card Login, as our private lives are increasingly surveilledby governments and data mined by marketers, we have more tools than ever with which togive our personal information away. our vacation photos on face book are geographicalwhereabouts when we check in on foursquare and the books that we are likely to buy offof an amazon wish list.
this conflicting desire for fame and for privacysets the stage for an investigation of the possibilities and consequences provided tous by the ever expanding information age. another back drop for this conversation thatyou'll hear tonight is the walker summer long program called open field which seeks amongmany things, to conceive of a cultural commons outside on the walker's big green lawn. the notion of the commons, the resources thatwe collectively share for the good of the whole has generated a significant discoursein the past several decades about intellectual property rights and digital property rightsin the digital age. who owns information? how is it managed? andwho benefits from these arrangements? these
questions are critical as technological innovationsgain the power to scan our retinas at the airport and predict our physical movementsthrough video analytics and other such things. whether or not you view these kinds of technologiesas advancements, they certainly complicate an already confusing reality of digitizedidentity, especially if you're trying to disappear which is our topic for tonight. both of ourguests this evening have an interest in things that have gone missing. after writing a feature story in "wired magazine"on faked deaths and disappearances journalist evan ratliff made his own attempt at livingunderground. in the nearly one month's stint that he'll talk about this evening, the authortried to vanish and then invited the public
to try and find him. the resulting contest which was supportedand sponsored by "wired" ignited a firestorm of interests among hackers and amateur investigatorsalike. official blog posts from the magazine's editorprovided information such as the fugitive's bank account withdrawals, while a nationwidenetwork of followers twittered their guesses, formed dueling face book groups and decodedscrambled ip addresses in a rush to out data mine their competitors to find evan and collecta cash prize. to close out the saga, evan reported on thesocial experience of hiding in plain view in this second piece for "wired magazine".when not on the run from tech savvy man hunters,
evan is contributing editor at "wired" whosewriting has also appeared in the "new yorker" and "the new york times sunday magazine" amongother well respected pages. his broad range of interests have led himto research and write on issues ranging from modern medicine to bio fuel development andevolutionary biology as well as numerous works on the politics of terrorism, trans nationalcrime and technology, including his co-authored book called "safe: the race to protect ourselvesin a newly dangerous world." he will be joined on stage tonight by petereleey, a curator who worked in our visual arts department here until recently and nowholds the posts of curator at ps1 contemporary arts center in new york. he curated the "talentshow" as well as last summer's the lovett
exhibition, "the quick and the dead". "the quick and the dead included several invisibleart works or objects that you could say went in to hiding in one way or another, a particularinterest of peter's. so before we delve into this conversationon art, privacy in the digital world let me remind you that you are being recorded. [laughs] . the program his evening is alive on the weband will be archived on the walker channel which is the section of our web site thathouses past artist's talks and programs as well as interviews with artists and curators. so, when we get to the q&a at the end, i askthat you flag down one of the ushers who will
have a microphone in the aisle, so that yourcomments can get recorded unless, of course, you prefer for them to disappear. so, with that, please welcome, peter and evan. [applause] peter eleey: is anyone else cold? [laughter]i don't know that we can do anything about that, but thank you all for coming and puttingup with the cold air to be with us tonight. it's very nice to be back in minneapolis,in particular, at the walker. and thanks to evan for making the trip. evan ratliff: glad to be here.
peter: what we decided we would do is thati'm going to talk a little bit about art background for the conversation and hopefully set thestage a bit for evan's discussion about his time on the run last year which, i guess,was almost a year ago. evan: almost a year ago, it started in august. peter: and, so, i'll talk a little bit aboutthe show, how many people here have seen the show? ok, so some people have. i'll assumethat most people haven't, in any case. but, let me see if this is working, it's working.ok. so, i thought i'd start with this slide asa way to just to introduce the conversation, which is a work that's not actually in theexhibition, which is a piece by a german painter
named gerhardt richter, titled "betty." what's interesting to me about the piece isthat it's a counter-portrait, right? we normally think of portraits as providing a particularlyintimate likeness of the subject. but, in this case, the subject is looking away fromus. so, it's this paradoxical portrait, which i like. it's an anti-performance as a performancestill. and, i guess just to introduce the show somewhat,this is a piece that is in the show, this is a work by an italian artist, no longeralive, named piero manzoni, from 1961, a version of which is in the exhibition that you caninteract with. it's called "the magic base for living sculptures."so, the idea is that if you stand on this
pedestal, you can become a work of art. whichis a nice idea, right? around the same time, the artist was actuallygoing around signing people with a marker on the street and turning people into livingsculptures that way. and then, this is a piece from 1967, by anargentinean artist, named david lamellas, which is just a simple theatrical spotlightin a darkened gallery that demarcates the space, almost into people who are watchingor people who are putting themselves on view by stepping into the light. and so, when i was thinking about the show,it came out of both my interest in these 1960s performative-based works that invite you todo something, particularly, putting yourself
on view, or placing yourself into a differentcontext from just a watcher or a looker or a spectator. and, i guess putting that into a context thatwas situated and informed by my interest in a couple of broader cultural things that fora while, i thought for a while had nothing to do with art in the back of my mind, oneof which is social media, which i have grave ambivalences about. i don't do facebook or twitter or really anyof these things, because they somehow make me very uncomfortable. but, they're fascinatingto me in how they've achieved a cultural prominence and also the backlash against these thingshave been interesting to me.
and, at the same time, the continuing, expandinggovernmental role in our private lives which is remarkably undiscussed i think and unresisted. so now, i don't know how many years into knowingthat the government can read our emails and listen to our phone calls without any additionalpermission needed and that's sort of just the fact of life now of living in america. so, all of these things came together in mythinking about this show. made me think differently about these kinds of pieces. and so, i was led sort of in thinking backto the richter painting [?] a little bit to a piece from late 70's or the 80's by veryinteresting taiwanese artist immigrated illegally
to the united states name tsi chings tsay [?] who is most famous for having done a series of year long endurance pieces. onward, he taught himself to another artistfor an entire year. another one where he lived in a cage for an entire year. before he started any of these things whilehe was working as an illegal laborer in new york city restaurants, he decided that heshould actually instead of being afraid that the government would find him look at thatdifferently and think... well, actually there are a lot of people whowanted to find him. in that sense he was very popular.
and so he made a flyer for himself with hisfingerprints and information from his passport. he didn't actually distributed it until acouple years later when he was actually living in outdoors in new york for an entire year. and no one actually made the connection andhe is now a naturalized us citizen. this is an interesting drawing by a belgian artistwho lives in mexico city named francis ellis where he mapped out a path of least surveillancethrough the city of london. sort of pen line that you see is francis figuringout how to get through the most surveilled city on earth. relatively unseen, he callsthis the clandestine way. now a piece of what i have in the show isthis ski mask that is pictured here being
worn by chris burden who used it in a piecein the 1970's that was called "you'll never see my face in kansas city". he went to kansas city to do a performancein a gallery and wore this the entire time he was in kansas city. and this followed anotherearly performance piece of his. he is best known for having a friend shoothim in the arm with a 22 rifle among a range of other masochistic performances from the1970's. but one of his first performances was to disappear for three days, which i alsothink is interesting. and so the relic of that in the exhibitionis an empty retrieve [?] below card that is describing what he did. another artist noton the show named lilazano, actually removed
herself from the art world as an art work,as a performance. this is a note from a predecessor to thatpiece called the "general strike piece" where she describes and records the last time shevisits the museum, the gallery and document all that as part of the work itself. eventually, she actually dropped out entirelythe pieces called "drop out piece" and this is 1969. and eventually moved down to texas.more or less disappeared. i think moved to europe for about ten years. eventually comeback to texas, vanished from the art world. but also more or less from many of her friends,died and was buried in an unmarked grave in texas.
this is another of tsi chings [?] pieces.this is more or less his last year long piece where he said he would do a one year performance.very similar to lilazano, not talk about art, not see art, not read about art, not go toa gallery. all these for a one year period and when thatis finished... i'm sorry this slide is so bad. he did another one where he said i tsiching say have a 13 years plan. i will make our art during this time so thisis a shift but i will not sure publicly this will begin in my 36th birthday december 31st,1986 and continue until my 49th birthday december 31st 1999. and when that was done, he made this flyerand invited friends to an opening or i guess
finishing party to celebrate the conclusionof this piece which time he declared he no longer is an artist. and since that time he has not made any morework. interestingly, this piece... i like to have... uses the aesthetic of a kidnapransom note and he interestingly in an interview a couple of years ago did talk about the artthat he made during that 13 year period and it was rather oddly trying to disappear asa secret performance. and he moved out to seattle and i think workedin a fish cannery and tried to make his way to alaska. of course alaska being this greatbeacon of invisibility almost. it is where you go to disappear, resist americanculture in a certain way. this is a young
italian artist named roberto cuoghi who triedto disappear into the persona of his father. he gained a span of weight. dressed like hisfather, adopted his mannerisms and way of speaking and lived like this for five yearsduring which time his father died. and so he lived on this weird doppelgangerof his dad. and then at a certain point decided that he needed to go back to being himselfand actually have surgeries to reclaim his old body, which i think is fascinatingly odd. other artist named seth price made an artistbook actually called from bits and pieces of the various kind of anarchist handbooksthat exist with advice about how to disappear in america that have changed over time andsort of stage for evans piece and efforts.
and i guess sort of thinking about alaskaagain. i was reminded about the story of christophermccandlless who was pictured in the book and in the film into the wild who moved to alaska,run away from his family and essentially starved to death in the wilderness there. but this is the last photograph of him whichhe took himself not long before he died. and i guess i am struck that even at this greatremoved from society, there is the inability to resist to be photographed in the sense. to put yourself in front of a camera, evenas you are checking out for the world. so i guess that is a natural way to introduceevans project. and with that i turn it over
to you. evans: all right. so, as sherwin mentionedwhat i was interested in doing. i started out because i was obsessed with people whofake their own death. and i have been collecting stories about peoplewho faked their deaths over the years and i was trying to find out some way to do alonger story on one of these people. and i finally got right magazine to do a storyand it was centered around a guy from arkansas who build a lot of debt on its corporate creditcard and he decided to fake drown himself and go start a new life. the story is about how he got caught and theprocess of that all looking at all this other
people who got caught in there. many of them are really hilariously bad atdisappearing. and they always do something that in the end you say, i can't believe thatthey did that. there was one guy, he lived in indianapolisand he tried to fly a plane. he was going to jump out of the plane and was going tocrash in the gulf of mexico and he was pilot. so he went through the whole process. he setit all up and then he flew over alabama. he radioed the tower just as he planned. saidmy windshield exploded, i have to jump out of the plane. but actually he did say i am going to jumpoff the plane, he just said my windshield
exploded, i think of going down. and thenhe parachuted out of the plane. unfortunately for him, they scrambled fighter jets to goexamine this plane which has stopped responding and there was no one it. and then he also had failed to put enoughgas in the plane. so the plane actually crashed and not in the gulf of mexico but in floridaon the ground and there was no body in it. but what interested me even more than thatwas that then they finally caught him. he actually didn't go to trial and had to pleadguilty because one of the pieces of evidence they had against him was they had confiscatedhis laptop. and on his laptop were google searches forhow to jump out of a plane at x number of
feet. google searches for all the places hehad planned to go for moving money into different bank accounts. so he had basically left a road map of everythingthat he wanted to do on his computer without even realizing that he had done so. so as i was collecting these stories and doingthis, i got together with my editor. and we started thinking the real way to get at theheart of how difficult this is, because you always say 'oh why did they make that mistake'would be for me to actually try to do it. so the parameters we set up were that i wouldtry to disappear for a month. that i wouldn't actually try to go off the grid, i wouldn'tgo live in a tent in a national park because
for a month it would be pretty difficult forsomeone to find me. and over a longer a period of time even that, you could be found. so i would actually try to adopt entirelynew identity. i would try to use all of the technologies that i use now including socialnetworking which i do i am a participant in, but as a new person. so i'd actually try tocreate a new identity and then jump into that identity and leave my old one behind. and then people could win $5, 000 if theyfound me in person, took my picture and said a code word which was fluke, which was a referenceto the guy from arkansas who disappeared and took his dog with him. this dog name fluke.he was discovered eight months later with
his dog and his wife, and his kid. so those were the general parameters. i wouldtry not to break the law, just so we would avoid any legal trouble when i got back. otherthan that we just threw it open to whatever people would try to do. we had to make it a little bit easier forthe general public because if an investigator was looking for you, they would have subpoenas,they could get access to your bank accounts, your email potentially. so instead, we would just release all that.so my editor had passwords to everything, every part of my life. so frequent flyer accounts,bank accounts, credit cards, and he could
reveal anything that he wanted to out of those.my phone records, who i'd called for the last month. so that's how we set it off. and then i took off from san francisco. butactually before that, what i had to do was i had to try to figure out what this new identitywas going to be like. and how could i sever it from my old identity. so i adapted a newname which was james donald gatz, donald is actually my middle name, which was one ofthe mistakes i made. it didn't end up costing me but when peopletried to disappear, often times they carry something over from their previous life. andthat's the way they end up getting caught. they use the same birth date, or they'll transposethe numbers in their birth date or in their
social security number, so, using my middlename was a bad idea. but, i adopted a new name, james gatz is thatit's a name that, in "the great gatsby, " it's actually the great gatsby's originalname before changes it to jay gatsby. but it had a practical purpose too, whichwas, if somebody googled me, if i met someone and i told them my name and they googled me,in the digital age, there's a little bit of an issue if you have no presence online. in a certain community of people, you aresuspicious and you'll read stories about people that go on dates and the first thing theydo when they go home from the date is, they google the person.
so, i wanted to have a reasonable excuse forwhy someone googled me they couldn't find anything because all they would find wouldbe references to the great gatsby. so, then i tried to develop these aspectsof my identity, the ways of using money. so these are gift cards that you pay cash forand they're completely anonymous and you can register online under a fake name. then, i used those cards to order anothercard online, which actually had my name on it. and it looks like a credit card, i gotthe patriotic flag waving one, and it says, gift card in the corner, but most places,if i went and used it, they would treat it almost like a piece of id.
i had business cards, which were referencesto a company that i started called, bespect - bepect research, which i always describedit, it's like respect with "b" which also doesn't mean anything. [laughter] and then, i mocked up a fake id - well, ihad a fake id, you may have seen it. it was actually a university id and i called myselfa visiting scholar, because, creating a regular driver's license or passport, would get meinto legal problems, so i mostly try to stay within the parameters of this low-level id. and then, i would often tell a story thati had lost my driver's license but i had this scholar's id, i had this credit card and wasthat enough to get me by?" and, at most hotels,
at most places where they're going to routinelyask for driver's license for no apparent reason, that was enough. [crosstalk] evan: so, then i had the company - the companythat i had was actually registered in the state of new mexico. it's a real company,it's called bespect, llc, it is still registered; it's not registered to my name. and then, i also wanted to separate everythingfrom my old life to my new life, so i rented an office under a fake name and i had allof my mail under my fake name, show up at that office, including this gift card.
i had it sent there. because any mail thati had sent to my own address with the fake name, creates a connection in a database somewherebetween these two identities. so, here, you can see the website for my company.it had some fake projects that i had whole back stories for. i had a reason why i wastraveling around the country. i had a fake twitter account, but this was me, talkingabout my daily business as i went on this trip around the country. and, at different points, i would make itpublic or make it private, depending on how paranoid i was that someone was followingit. sometimes i would seed it with false information if i thought people were paying attentionto it.
this is my facebook page. and this was interestingbecause, if you or i sign up for facebook, the way it usually works is somebody says,"oh, you should sign up for facebook" and then, you connect with them and then theyknow some of your friends, and you connect with them and pretty soon, you have a networkof your friends. you send them some invitations, maybe yourfamily as well, but, as james gatz, i didn't have any friends; i didn't know anyone andi didn't want to connect with anyone that i knew. so it created this dilemma of how do i manufacturefriends out of nothing, and it turns out there are people on facebook who will friend anyone.
[laughter] and most of them are multilevel marketinggurus and real estate people. so, i would find people who had 900, 1000, 2000 friendsthat i would send them request. and pretty soon i built up a pretty good collection offriends. a lot of these are from after but i had 30, 40 friends. none of whom i actually knew, none of whomknew me. but if someone look me up and oftentimes i would say, "oh, look me up on facebook."and it created this perception that i was a real person. who would concoct this entireidentity with business cards? you just gave an authenticity. so it was lookingat both sides of this question.
people could use my old information to trackme but i can also use the whole idea of digital identity to develop this new person who wouldhave back story because he existed online. so then, i just go to this quickly becauseit get a little technical but basically, one big problem i have was i was staying online.i had to show that i was online so i had to... i would log into to my email everyday, myreal email. and if any of you use gmail, you may not have ever noticed. but in a tiny,tiny font at the bottom of the screen, it says last logged in from and it has your ipaddress and actually if you click further, it has your last five ip address. it is basicallyrecording every computer that you've logged in from.
and your computer has an ip address when itattaches the internet and that ip address correlates to your physical location. andi'll talk about it in a little minute but you can use the ip address to locate not justwhere someone is generally but their specific address. so, i had to do something to conceal my ipaddress to show that i wasn't where i was in terms of the ip address. so i use something called tor which is a softwarethat is design for whistle blowers and dissidents to use so that they can mask where informationis coming from. it has been in the news a lot lately if you follow the news about wikileaksthis website. they have a lot of interaction
with tor. so basically tor masks how you access to theinternet. so if i am alice, i am trying to get something from bob's web server. tor makesit look like i am jumping from that last computer to bob server. and basically all these hopsin between are anonymous. so if bob is there and he is saying who isaccessing my server, it might look like it is coming from germany when in fact i am inlos angeles. but then i had a friend who worked in google. he said tor can be cracked. anythingcan be cracked. so that is not safe enough. so instead what i did was i took these computersand i left them at an anonymous office i rented in las vegas which is this windowless room.i set the computers up. i attached them to
the internet. i rented the office for theentire month and what i did when i wanted to access the internet was i actually remotelylogged in to these computers. i use these computers to access the internet.and if someone ever traced my ip back, they would only get as far as las vegas. and infact later on he did. so i set up around the country. i started in san francisco. i droveto vegas. i set up my computers then i sold my car. i started taking other forms of transportation. i went to la then i get online and hitch aride with a band, a small indie band who is touring across country. so i went to la andthey cruise across texas and i was just riding along in their van, helping them pay for gas.and basically, they left me alone.
this map is actually made by someone chasingme. it is not entirely accurate but essentially, i went to saint louise in the van. i tooka train down to new orleans and then i rented an office and i rented it under a fake name. i signed a lease and i would do things likei had anonymous paypal account. not anonymous but attached to my fake name. i would contact the landlord over the internetand ask them if they took paypal. sometimes i rent an apartment for a week and i nevereven saw the landlord. he just left me a key in a box. i paid him with paypal. as far as he knew i was james gatz and asfar as i pay the bill, he didn't care. so
then the other thing in my house was my pictureswere in the magazine. not only in the magazine but everyday, they are publishing more andmore pictures. i have given them essentially dossier of informationabout me. the state kind of thing that an investigator would uncover based on some timeinterviewing family, things like that. so, i had to disguise my physical appearancebecause i did not know if anyone i have encountered along the way might have seen the magazineand anyone could catch me. so all they had to do was, having seen the magazine, knowthe code word and take my picture. so i wanted to do a little bit to mask my physical appearance. first, i grow out this scraggly beard. thisis the first day then i shifted towards a...
this is my las vegas look so these are fakeglasses and i dyed my hair and i dyed the goatee as well. i slipped it back. this isfrom the end and you can't see that well but i had four pairs of fake glasses, sun glasses. i had multiple of different contact hats.all the stuff that i was carrying with me along with enough digital gear to stuff aradio shack basically. i had portable... i mean throw away phones. i had different waysto access the internet and all these stuff that i was carrying along with me. so then, here i am in los angeles. and i actuallygot in a band in a street video and at that time, swine flu was... there was a big swineflu... there was a woman who does an online
news report who was going around on a speechasking people what you think about swine flu. i thought this was a really funny thing forme to get into and then later i can say; see i wasn't hiding out from the world here. iwas on venice piece, not only that but i was on his video and the video was published onlineand she has a lot of fans. i was out there to be found. so then this is me in new orleans. i got hat.i washed up the dye by this point. and then i started building up a lot of paranoia evenstarting in la. in fact, one of the things that's in the finalstory was that i actually ran from a helicopter one day on venice beach because i had usedmy atm card to deposit the check from my selling
the car because this was like a cashier'scheck. i didn't want to lose it. it was three thousanddollars. it was not something that you just don't want to be careful with. so i just thoughti would just deposit it. i was leaving la. i don't care if they knew i used this atm.but i couldn't get out as quickly as i wanted to. i couldn't get my ride out of la. so basically one morning i was down on thebeach. there was a helicopter and it was hovering over me. i thought well that is weird andthen i moved down the beach and it moved down the beach. and i thought well there is nothing else goingon in this beach. it was six in the morning.
i was out for a jog and few surfers were out. and then, i thought someone has seen thisatm thing. they posted it online and they have got a friend who has a helicopter andthey are coming out to get me because for five thousand dollars, you pay the friendsa few hundreds for using the helicopter and still making good money. so i started running and then the helicopterreally started following me because there is this guy on the beach, probably sprintingas fast as he can across the beach and that is really something you want to check out,so i actually ran from this helicopter and run up and down all these street and goneout of la that day.
so anyway, long story short, i was paranoidto a lot of this so i decided to go with more extreme disguises which were this. [laughter] so, i shave the top of my head. i wore themustache and you can see i wore the colored contacts so i have blue eyes and my eyes arebrown. and this was my businessman look. and i use this especially. i took one flight,i took two flights but i flew one flight. i had to use my real id because i did notwant to mess using my fake id, obviously on airplanes post 9/11. so, i went with thiskind of businessman; lot of tie. and, at the airport, the only person that'sgoing to look at my id was going to be the tsa person. and, if you've flown at all, thetsa people don't actually pay that close attention
to the photo on your driver's license. so,i made it through with this disguise. so, that's all the stuff that i was doing.and then the question was, what was everyone else doing? what were the people trying tofind me doing? and, the first thing they did they spontaneously organized online. they created these organic communities ofpeople who were looking for me. so, this is the facebook that they created, i think, onthe first day. and, after about 24 hours, there were a thousandmembers of this facebook group. and what they were trying to do was developways to coordinate because they had a problem in that, even if they knew where i was, unlessthey wanted to lay out money to come find
me if i wasn't close to them, it was goingto be very difficult to find me because i could be anywhere in the country. but, if they collaborated, then if one personhad the information about where i was, they could contact someone who was closer to wherei was and give it a shot. and that's what they were doing. one guy took off in the middle of the nightand drove all the way to vegas from san diego when there were signs that i might be in vegasand missed me, actually, by a couple of days. so, then they also got on twitter and thiswas the hub of where they were exchanging information back and forth, whether it wasthings that were put out by wired, things
from my accounts, or things that they discoveredonline. so by the end of the day on the first day, they're digging into everything theycould find about me online. they were also digging into databases thatsome people have access to, like, lexis-nexus and choice point. so, by the end of, i think,24, 36 hours, every address that i'd ever lived at was published online. someone hadalready found them all and put them all out there. and i had moved a lot of times, sothis was a dozen addresses that were all there. and then, they made wanted posters, whichthey would put up in places where they thought that i might be going. one of the things thatwas part of the information that wired put out about me was that i have something calledceliac disease, which means that i have to
eat a gluten-free diet. and so, these were all over gluten-free cafesin seattle, [laughter] restaurants that catered to gluten-free people. and, even the morning,when i ran for the helicopter, when they eventually did discover i was in la, they went out toseveral restaurants that they thought i might be located at and actually scoured those restaurantslooking for me. so, this is a map someone made of points ofinterests, of places, it's got every address i lived at on there. it's got, i think it'sgot my family's address on there. it's got some work-related stuff. but one thing, that interests me is, if youlook to the bottom, i don't know if you can
read it, but it has call car collision andlily's pet care, which are actually things people found out i had reviewed online. so, i had gone on this website called yelpand, thinking that it was pseudo anonymous, i had actually reviewed, i mean, not reallyeven thinking about the consequences of it or anything, i just reviewed the person whocat sits my cat. and this woman got dozens of calls from people who had gone and foundthat that's what i had reviewed. now, i'm not a big reviewer of online thingsbut, if you think about it, if you were and then you disappeared, you've actually leftan entire map of the things you like and don't like, which would be an incredibly valuabletool for an investigator.
and, then, this is actually like a networkdiagram that someone made of both the ip addresses, which are at the very bottom and, again, thisis very early on. it's got credit card expenses on there. and then, they did things like not just lookingonline, doing searches which they were incredibly good at, but there were actually investigators,informed investigators, who were involved. and they used very tried and true investigativetechniques which were just calling people over and over again. so, if they wanted to find out a piece ofinformation and they were supposed to by the rules of the contest not break the law aswell. they would just call and ask for it.
so if they wanted to know about a fedex packagethat was on my credit card, they would just call fedex and say 'i want to know where thispackage was sent to or from' and the fedex person would say 'well, are you this person'and they would say 'no' and they would say 'i can't tell you that'. they would hang up. they would call and theywould get the next person. and they would ask the same questions. but eventually theywould find some person who answered the phone who would just give it to them. which is reallyperfectly legal. and they did the same thing with my ip addresses.i mentioned i had this office in las vegas. i had the computers in it. eventually theyfound out the ip address for that office.
but an ip address only correlates to a fewcity blocks. and so you need to get access to the actualinternet service provider in order to find out where the specific address is. and a kid from portland, a 17 year old kidwho got really obsessed with trying to find me, he started calling that internet serviceprovider. eventually the technician said, 'oh yeah that's 2465, south pecos road.' andthen they had my address. now fortunately i had a contingency plan for that. but it just goes to show that it's not actually,when i started out i thought the issue was all the information that we put out online,which is true, which is an issue when it comes
to privacy. but if you are actually worried about theinformation that corporations have, and how they use it, they are not keeping as quietas tight the tabs on as you might expect. and then the last thing i'll show is thisis my cat. and the reason i was showing this is that, so this was posted on flickr publicphoto site, i have a page on flickr where i post pictures of my cat and other things. but what someone did was they actually tookthe pictures on flickr and they stripped out the information about the camera that theywere taken with. and then they created a little program, alittle piece of software that had an algorithm
that essentially scoured flickr looking forother pictures taken with that camera, the idea being that if i was out there with thesame camera, taking pictures and posting them anonymously, then they could turn up my locationby finding pictures. fortunately i didn't actually take that camerawith me. so which will see even if the name of the camera is actually taken with, thereit is, right there. so then i was settled in new orleans, i had this apartment rented.i was paranoid but i was feeling pretty good about how i was doing. it was getting up to day 20, day 23, day 25.meanwhile there was one guy, his name is jeff reifman. he lives in seattle. he used to workat microsoft. he now has this thing where
he builds facebook applications. they are like web pages within facebook. thepurpose of these is actually to organize people around news. and he read the story and hesaw the disappearance contest. he said well, this is a good way to attract attention fornew venture. so he created this thing called vanish team.so he built this, it lives inside of facebook and it had all kinds of information aboutmy disappearance. and it has a map. and people annotated the map and people were exchangingclues. but after a while, people stopped coming toit a little bit and he wasn't getting anywhere. he kept tabbing these theories about wherei was and they weren't cracked. but then he
decided he could do something else with that,which is he could lure me to this page and then try to capture my ip address when i visitedthe page. and the way he did that was he had this code,and this code right here, all it does is, if someone visits his facebook page, theyhave to be logged into facebook when they are, it captures their ip address and theirfacebook profile. so here he has this list. everybody that'svisited my page, which was hundreds of people a day. but, he could sort them. so he couldsay, all right, give me all of the people who have less than 30 friends. that's whathe did at the beginning. and he figured, this guy has got a fake facebookpage, he can't have that many friends. so
i had outwitted him at first. i had 30 or40. and he didn't find me in the first couple of days. and then he bumped it up to 50. and he lookedthrough every single person visiting his page that had less than fifty friends, and he cameacross this, which is my page which you would recognized because i had been in that manon the street video and since then i hadn't changed my photograph. so then he knows, this is me, he knows whati am visiting, his facebook application and then he knows my ip address because he hasthat piece of code that captures it, which i think technically at the time was againstfacebook's terms of service for him to even
do that. but he had an advantage which is that, i didn'tactually know that he could do that, i didn't know that he could build something insidefacebook without permission to capture ip addresses. so that in combination with the fact thati was getting a little bit lazy after twenty-five days because the method that i had setup toaccess the internet anonymously took forever. so, it was incredibly slow, so i started pairingdown the number of websites i visited using my anonymous methods. so then, i hid his page, he gets my ip address,he starts following me around and then, i'll
condense the end of the story but he had aproblem which is that he had to find people on the ground to capture me, because i wasin new orleans, he was in seattle. and he used this piece of information thathad come out, that i have celiac disease that i eat a gluten free diet and he contactedthe only gluten free pizzeria in all of new orleans. there's one, it's called naked pizza and heknew that i would probably end up eating it, which was true but they actually did it onebetter which is that naked pizza got so into catching me that they gave my photo to allof their delivery people, all of their employees. [crowd laughing]
then they covered the city looking for meand so eventually, peter. peter: how did they know that you like pizza? evan: i think that came out in an interviewthat they did with a friend of mine that pointed to my, low grade eating habits. peter: oh, wait, now i remember they actually,with an ip capture realize that you had visited the site. evan: yeah, that's right; he also knew thati had visited the website, because once he contacted them, then they were also lookingfor my ip address; they made the comparison. so, long story short, i think i am new orleanslocal, i think i am all set, i have got five
days to go and i ride my bicycle up to a bookstoreand these guys are waiting outside and they snap my photo and they actually say, "do youknow about some guy named fluke" which is close enough to the code word that they havecaptured me. and actually the funny thing about this photois that i am still wearing my fake wedding ring [crowd laughing] which is part of mydisguise, i don't know why i deem that to be a proper disguise [crowd laughing] but,i don't know. peter: well, you also shaved your head? evan: i had shaved my head, so that day, rightbefore i rode over actually, i had gone to my final disguise which was shaving off therest of my hair and going bald and then i
was going to go to wigs after that, but inever got there. so that was basically it and people alwaysask me did i prove one way or another, did it prove that it is impossible to disappearin america. or do i think that someone can really do it. and obviously, how hard it is to disappearis entirely a function of how hard people are looking for you and there were a lot ofsmart people who are looking for me. but i think it did illustrate a couple ofthings, one of which is about the information that you put out about yourself is actuallythe information that's the greatest threat or, you may not view it as a threat but whenit comes to privacy, most of the information
that you would worry about is actually theinformation that you are revealing. and almost everything that people used, wasinformation that i had voluntarily put out about myself. the fact that corporations collectdata about me is an issue, but when it comes to this actual real world situation that stuffwasn't the stuff that i had to worry about. the stuff i had to worry about was the stuffthat i had put out. and then the other thing is the way that people,they were this hive mind quality to it all. people acting individually couldn't paintthe picture of me that people acting collectively could. and even in the end, jeff reifman used thissort of supreme individual effort to figure
out my ip address but he could only catchme through collaboration. so it is interesting experiment in how thatworks. subsequent to that the department of defense actually replicated this in a waywith, they put weather balloons all around the country and they ran this contest to seeif anyone could identify or who most quickly could identify where all the weather balloonswere. and who could form teams to find them. itfollowed much the same structure as this. so that was the experiment and, peter: what we are going to do, how that is,you were just going to lay low in new orleans and trying to ride it out.
evan: no. i had already bought a plane ticketactually to new york. i wanted to finish in new york because that's where wired's parentcompany which is called conde nast is based in times square in new york. and i wantedto infiltrate the conde nast building. i had already marked up a fake, i had a fake badge. i had visited the building before i left andgotten one of their badges and i had photoshopped it in. i had it with my shaved head, i addedthe picture, so i was ready to go. but they also were ready for me in new yorkand they apparently had funded some 10, 000 or 20, 000 flyers that they were going toleave at every kinkos in the city. and anyone can come in and put them up. so they wantedto have this dramatic finale of people chasing
me all over new york city but there wasn'tto be. peter: but it didn't work. yeah, it's funnybecause, we met actually before, i think i knew about the piece but i hadn't really,i thought about it in a context of the show before we had met, but then it became reallyinteresting to think about in the context of the exhibition. when we did meet, i guess there were all theseways in which this project combined, i think part of the reason why it was so popular isthat combined these two desires. this desire for notoriety and participationin the culture at large through social media kinds of networking and exhibitionism. andat the same time this interest in privacy
which i think increasingly lots of new storiesseem to cover. kids who find themselves, recent college graduateswho have gone all the way through college on facebook, now find themselves strugglingin an economy like this one to find, to get job interviews when people can find all kindsof bad drinking pictures of them online, are trying to manage their digital lives differently. evan: well, then there was an inherent ironyin the whole thing in that, the whole idea was supposed to be that i am disappearing,that i am showing what it is like to disappear. and yet everyday i had the surreal experiencewhere i could get online and there were thousands of people talking about me. and talking aboutwho are my friends and, look at this new picture
of him, and i found a video of him. so it was also the ultimate exposure in away. at the same time that i was, the whole point was supposed to be disappearing; theopposite effect was taking place. peter: did you do anything differently. didyou modify your behavior or digital lifestyle or any other aspect of it after this was over? evan: to be honest i didn't really. i tightenedup my facebook privacy settings. the kinds of things that people do. but for me it istoo late. all the stuff out there, it is still all out there. even you can find my signature on the apartmentthat i bought. everything is posted online.
i just had to rely in the end on the factthat once the context was over nobody, that people could care less about me or my information. so besides being weird, it didn't really seemto change my life much once it is over. but now i am a little more careful but i thinkyou have to make almost a holistic decision whether you want to join that world or not.i mean what you were saying with not being on facebook and not being on twitter. you can do partial measures but then you arerelying on the companies, their goodwill that they are going to help you. they have no interestin helping you maintain your privacy. so the easiest way to maintain your privacy is notto join.
peter: right. the strangest thing for me isto find periodically that i am actually on facebook even without having a facebook account.there are pictures of me sometimes that other people post from a party or something andthen tag afterwards. and tag them to me so that somehow i am still there, which is bizarre. it is weird way in which socially now we havealmost been trained to surveil each other under the guise of fun or networking or thisbenign sharing of information where we find ourselves mimicking what the government isdoing in a certain way. i would want to know what the government isdoing but, i just think it is fascinating that in the last decade we have essentiallyseen this collapse between the state security
apparatus on one hand and the entertainmentdigital cultural apparatus on the other. now they work sometimes in tandem as yourproject pointed out, and then sometimes independently. you were saying before that you went and gavea presentation at the cia. did you ever ask them what they were interested in? evan: i did. well, i asked them many times.so i got invited to come speak to the cia at the cia headquarters at a conference thatthey have. at first i thought it was a joke actually. partly because the cia acts in reallybizarre ways like they would only send me things in unmarked envelopes typed on actualtypewriter. so it looked like someone was playing jokeon me. but it turned out they did want me
to come and speak. i kept asking, a lot them, what they saidwas that they had a challenge which is related to the challenge that i had in this. whichis that when they have agents go overseas and they need an identity that in the olddays you can give them a fake business, you could give them a name and business cardsas i had and they could go with it. but now because of database technology, youcan run a background check on someone for 25 bucks. and that background check will getthings like every address they have ever lived at, their credit history. all of that stuffexists. so what they called the backstop for the identityhas to be much deeper than it used to be.
now, they didn't learn anything from me, abouthow to do that. i think it was more, because i thought about the same issue. they had some database experts who spoke atthe same time, who actually really did have advice on those topics, but i had no adviceto share on how they could improve their identities. peter: so it is weirdly easier, it soundslike, and we have talked about this before, to steal someone else's identity then to tryand create a fictional one. evan: yeah, it all partly depends on whatside of the law you want to be on. so in my case, if i wanted to buy a fake passport,if i wanted to go online and get into a social security number, mark and advise a socialsecurity number.
those things are possible online. but in termsof establishing a new identity, especially if someone is looking for you. it is so muchharder than it used to be because, as much as there's some anonymity online, in the realworld, it's much harder to have anonymity than it ever was. you can go online and get into a forum andbe anonymous or go into second life or whatever you want but, in your real life, you needid for everything. you need a social security number for everything. and, to your point about the way that surveillancehas merged with hollywood and social networking and all these things, i had investigators,u.s. marshals and private investigators, who
specialize in looking for people who said: "twenty, thirty years ago, it would take usmonths to gather what we can gather in five minutes or less on facebook. if we want tofind someone, we would have to build up a profile about them." and what you've doneis you've actually built up a profile about yourself. and it goes even further than that, the fbiand u.s. marshals and secret service, they have fake profiles on facebook and they usethem to catch people. they use them to lure people into conversations and to give awaytheir location. peter: yes, i mean the best version of thatin reverse was the crashing of the white house
state dinner, by that couple who wanted tohave a reality show and somehow infiltrated state security in an effort to - and took pictures and then posted them onlineof themselves inside the barriers, supposedly maintained by the government to protect thepresident. [laughs] evan: right, yeah, it sort of just showingthat even though as much as they have more access to tools, it doesn't mean they're notbumbling. peter: right, right. maybe we should open it up for questions.people have questions? i think there are microphones around so everyone can hear it.
evan: this exhibit is called "minneapolisin winter." peter: and it's really cold. evan: it's so cold up here. man 3: hey, evan, i read your article whenit came out in "wired." and i was wondering, towards the end when you were getting reallyparanoid, like around the time of the helicopter thing, did you almost find yourself subconsciouslywanting to be caught just to be over with it? evan: well, the helicopter thing actuallyhappened at the end of the first week. so, that kind of paranoia built up when i realizedhow many people were paying attention to it.
because, remember, when we started it, wedidn't have any idea if five people or a hundred or a thousand were actually going to care.and this $5, 000.00 is a lot for this kind of thing or not. so, when i realized how manypeople were paying attention, i got pretty paranoid and that's when i ran from the helicopter. but, at this point, i really, really did notwant to get caught because, first of all, it would be embarrassing to get caught afteranything less than two weeks. and, also, i had put a lot of people througha lot of minor trauma to do this. my family was worried about what was going to happen.i left my girlfriend behind for a month and we were moving. and these were things thati wanted to try to push it as far as i could
and not have wasted everyone's emotional energyto do it. but, by the end, i think i actually fell offmy paranoia, partly because i had been worn down. i remember i was riding a train from,i think, new orleans to memphis and there was a guy sitting there and he kept lookingover at me and i just thought, this guy knows who i am, he recognizes me. and then he got off at the next stop and theni started thinking, "what am i doing? not everyone knows about this stupid contest.it's my entire world, but it's not everyone else's world." so, i think within that, was this idea oflike i just want it to be over at a certain
point. but... peter: that's also how you got caught. evan: ... it's partly how i got caught. butwhen i got caught, i was angry though. because, as it got closer to the end, there were onlyfour days left. man 1: and that $5, 000.00 looked closer andcloser. evan: exactly. and, i may not have mentioned,but $3, 000.00 of the $5, 000.00, i put up for it, so that was my incentive to not getcaught. [laughter] i was going to lose three grand. so, you can imagine when i finally, actuallygot caught, these guys are like jumping up
and down and dancing around, because theyjust won five grand and i'm sitting there having lost three and then they took me outand bought me a pizza. [laughter] peter: gluten-free. [laughs] evan: yes. peter: any question out there? woman 1: yes, my question is did you considernot inventing another identity for online, it would seem to me that if you wanted trulynot to be found, you would stay away from the internet entirely, but that wasn't yourchallenge i gather. evan: yes, you are absolutely right. if youwant to avoid being caught by your ip address
for example, you do not go online. and thatis the best thing for you to do. but at the same time, if you think about,it's one thing to think about escaping for a month. but if you think about trying tostart over in your life, you are saying you are not going to go online for the indefinitefuture. and my thought was, well if i actually didwant to abandon my life in the manner of someone who let's say fakes around death, i wouldn'twant to start over as a hermit. i like being online. i like using email. i like these things. so i wanted to see what the challenge wouldbe, if i did continue to use them. if i lived the life that was sort of parallel to my own,but with a different name.
man 4: and this is a question for evan. whatdid you expect to be difficult but found to be easy? evan: i think that the getting around waseasier than i expected. partly because, well i had a problem at first because i wantedto take amtrak a lot, but amtrak has an id requirement. i didn't realize that an id requirement,but then that was really scary at first. but then i realized how paper thin that requirementactually is, where no one is ever really paying attention. it is like this habitual securitymeasure. that if you think about, it doesn't really even accomplish anything. anyone can have an id and the fact that ishow you an id doesn't tell you anything about
what i am going to do or anything. so once i realized that they weren't reallypaying attention, and that i can talk my way around it wherever i went, then taking amtrakeven though they asked for id was easy. and also it was surprisingly easy. i thoughtit was going to be fun to convince people that i was who i said i was. and that's whyi had all this elaborate set up of web pages and facebook accounts and all that sort ofthing. but people are pretty trusting. they are notautomatically suspicious of you. so even though often times i was doing weird things, theband that i hitched a rod with, they wondered and they told me later they did wonder whatis this guy doing.
'why is he going across the country? he seemsto have no purpose. he is too old for this. and also his goatee is dyed. is he tryingto relive his youth or something?' but they didn't see i was doing any harm.and everyone i encountered, they had a natural trust that i guess if i followed out, it makessense. you don't automatically assume someone is giving you a fake name. but then lateri felt really guilty about it. so i actually went back and i had to apologizeto everyone that i had interacted with over the course of a month that i can find... yes. peter: it was also funny people are trustingin part because you are a white guy who looks like a generic american in a certain way.
evan: well that was whole another part ofthat which, for better or worse is not the genre of wired magazine topics. but of courselike the easiest way to disappear in america is to be marginalized and part of marginalizedcommunity. it is almost like a foreign notion to someonethat you should try to disappear when you are already feeling like you have got no resources,no one is paying attention. and that also carried over into, i can talkmy way and to doing things and in being places where people weren't suspicious of me justbecause of the way i looked or the way i was dressed. peter: was that part of the reason why theytsi chings tsai piece [?] i thought it was
so great because here is a guy who is performinghis invisibility as a work of art in a certain way, anyway. is there any other question out there? man 5: well, two questions. first one is dumb,what was the name of the band and the second one is that you said people were trying toformulate ideas and things about where you were going and what you were doing. what weresome of the wilder, more outlandish theories? evan: so the name of the band is hermit thrushes.they are from philadelphia. they are really a small band. they are really great. theyplay art, rock as they called it, like indie rock, but very experimental.
they were fun. they have played at bars withjust two or three people in lubbock, texas and then take off their shirts and their pantsand dance around. it was fun stuff. peter: and you talked to them since the articlecame out. evan: yes, not only have i talked to them,i went to see one of their shows in brooklyn and then they invited me to come on tour withthem again. and so the wilder theories, people were, itwas wild in terms of the way that they would think i was somewhere. it was interestinghow the information that was totally unverified, people would start to gather around it. so if someone would start a rumor that i wasin seattle, then other people would feed off
of it and then other people who entered theconversation later would not realize that it was based on a completely unfounded pieceof information. then they would start putting up flyers and doing things like that. i think the big theory that, the prevailingtheory for the better part of three or four days was that i was in hawaii. i had previouslylived in hawaii. so that made some sense. but they had this theory that i had takena cruise ship to hawaii, which was remarkable to me, because i had actually considered thepossibility of doing that. but if anyone bothered to look it up, thetime it takes to get to hawaii in a cruise ship would not account for the time that elapsed.and eventually someone said, wait, this is
not possible. they had already skipped thatstuff. and they were already looking at places inhawaii where i might be, and which island is on. is he in the old place where he livedbefore? and things like that. so that was probably the most the furthest afield. woman 2: sometime before your article wasin wired magazine, there was a large spread in wired about the disappearance of jim gray,the microsoft scientist. in any way did his disappearance inspire your project? evan: not in any conscious way that i canthink of. that was a great piece and that was a tragic story. but his was a case oflost at sea. and the interesting thing in
that case and why it made such a compellingstory was that he was a high-tech guy and he had all these friends in high-tech. they basically employed every possible resourcethat they could bring to bear on it and they still couldn't find him. so i don't know,maybe it did. i think i had been collecting these fake test stories for years and years.i had already started looking for an end. but it certainly may have given my editorsa reason to accept it. woman 3: i am wondering about the storiesthat you told the people about this new identity and if that was fun did you make up anythingabout your college experience. what was this small talk like when you were interactingand meeting people at bars or something like
that? is that hard to keep it straight too? evan: yeah, it was hard to keep it straight.and i will say that i thought that that would be fun. and it was not. it absolutely wasnot fun. partly because it is nerve wracking. i commend you to try this. try to go introduceyourself to someone, even just using a different name. it feels like such a fundamental deceptionbecause you are so used to introducing yourself as yourself, telling your story, reachingback into your memory to make connections. i have been to minneapolis, i came throughhere when i was driving across the country, and then to try to shut all that down andmake things up.
it is fun when you are sitting at home, doingit and saying, and i was, i was developing back stories. i'll say that i went to schoolhere, and i would always use things that i had knowledge of, so that if someone challengedme, oh my brother went to georgia tech, then i would say, oh well yeah, what dorm was hein. and i had some knowledge about even thoughi didn't go there. but i when i actually had to tell people these stories; i couldn't reallyconnect with them. because at a certain point, i didn't really want to talk about myself. i didn't want to respond in the way that youwould normally respond to. i wanted to shut the conversation down and move it in anotherdirection or make them talk about themselves.
so it ended up being, i was having such superficialrelationships with the people that i was encountering, even though naturally i was just meeting them.it was superficial anyway but even beyond that it was like it wasn't real and it feltguilty. peter: as you talked the one thing that ithought back on is when the unabomber case was going on. it was really when they startedturning evidence over to the public and having people could look at his handwriting. andwhen the manifesto came out his brother read and said this is his writing style. and thisis him. like going to see the cia, i have really seenwith the fbi being able to turn evidence like that over to the general public. and has anybodyever talked to you about stuff like that.
evan: yes, well. several investigators toldme that the best investigative tool that has evolved over the last 10 or 20 years is america'smost wanted. the us marshals will tell you that. they have pretty good resources. they areincredibly good at finding people, fugitives on the run. but it is a whole different thingwhen you can put their picture on tv and details about them, manipulated pictures of what theymight look like now, and then put it out to millions of people. and then afterwards there were some ideasthat the people who had, especially the core people who had worked so hard to find me,and were really, really good at it, and it
turned up so many clues. they would get together and develop a websitethat would help find actual missing people; it was actually a source of embarrassmentfor part of it. people were putting up flyers about me and there were actual real missingpeople who aren't getting the same resources. and i think they felt the same way. but theproblem is always, government investigators, they don't want to give away that informationuntil they are absolutely the most desperate to find someone. so they'll do the wanted poster and thingslike but they don't actually want to give away that investigative material.
in the unabomber case, that was years andyears after they were just completely desperate and it was fruitless, they weren't able tofind this guy, they thought let's just try this. peter: there is one back there. man 6: i was just wondering how successfulpeople were at actually finding information about you? you mentioned that they have yourip address in las vegas. but i was just wondering if there were other activities that you weredoing that they did discover about. evan: they were more successful at diggingup information that already existed, than they were actually finding out the day today information about me. because until someone
knew my fake name that was incredibly difficult.because i could be doing anything, i could be on any website; it could be anywhere. but, they were excellent at digging up everysingle bit of information from every crevice that can be gleaned online or through databasesthat investigators can access through public documents, whether real estate records ordriver's license. they found out that i got a motorcycle licenserecently, before i left and things like that. but, it wasn't until jeff reveman, was thefirst person to make a connection to my new identity. so to actually dig up a piece ofinformation about where i was right then and that was obviously, the key to my undoing.
i was careful that i didn't tell anyone includingmy girlfriend who i lived with, where i was going or what i was doing. i didn't even leavea hint. but, you could see how, through interviewsand the editors of wired were interviewing my friends and posting interviews online,that they could start to paint a picture. and one friend of mine even said, "i bet he'sin new orleans." just because we grew up together in atlanta,we had been to new orleans as kids and he thought, well that seems like a natural placefor him to go. so, my point is that the information frommy past eventually would coalesce into something that would probably help them find me. a monthwasn't long enough for that to really help,
so it really took someone making a connectionthrough finding my ip address and that thing. peter: hi, evan. evan: hi. peter: hindsight being 20/20, is there anythingthat you would have done differently those last couple of days that you look back andsay, "god, if i only would have done this." like, looked across that park before you wentto the pizza place or something like that? anything jump out at you like that? evan: yes, there was one single moment, actually,which was when the first time i accessed that page on facebook that jeff reefman created.i can distinctly remember making the decision
to not go through my vegas office, not usethe tor software to hide my ip address, thinking, i'm just accessing facebook. so, unless somebody who works at facebookis going to steal my ip and then give it out to the public, which, frankly, i should havebeen worried about as well, but, i thought, "wow, that's relatively unlikely." i thought, "i can't be bothered with all ofthis anymore. i'm just going to go check this page and see what people are saying." so,that moment right there, i would certainly change. and then, overall, i think that i would probablytry to change my location more quickly in
the last week, because i had spent so muchtime in new orleans, it was like they were closing in around me. but, again, it was this issue of, if you'rereally going to do this, if you really had to disappear, eventually you want to landsomewhere and live your life. and i was, i was going to cafes, i was going to bars. iwas having fun in new orleans as much as i could. i had an apartment and i didn't wantto be on the run constantly because it's exhausting. but, of course, if i really didn't want toget caught, and i can look back now that would be... i would have been out of there already,to a city with more than one gluten-free pizza place by the way. [laughter]
woman 4: i was wondering how you changed yourlife afterwards. for example, the prevalence of rfid chips that are coming out. peopleare volunteering to be implanted, to be vip members in clubs and have it put on theircredit card and their room charge that thing. evan: as much as you would think that becausei did this that i have strong feelings about privacy and that thing. i actually, don'tbecause, what you have to do is sit down and make the calculation. i think it's dumb to do things without actuallyreflecting on what they might mean for your privacy. but, if i decide, i don't know ifthe club would be a good example for me, but, if i decide that that convenience is worthit for me, that, you know, if some club knows
my information or even my date of birth, thenmaybe i don't care. maybe it's worth it to me, and if i want tomake that decision, fine. if you do, then you've got to hope that a lot of people makethat decision, because there's a sort of strength in numbers in the fact that everyone's doingthis and there's so much information that yours is sort of less important in the grandscheme of things. i don't like to be marketed to. i don't likepeople knowing things about me. but, at the same time, i recognize that a lot of thingsi do when i go order a book online or whatever, i do it because i'm making a choice for convenience. so, i suppose i do worry about it, but likemany people, i don't act on it. but i try
to at least, each time, to say "well, is thisworth it to me?" peter: there are also things that you can'tdo anything about, like i had to get a new passport last year and i guess it's been abouttwo years, three years. anyone who gets a new passport now, there'sa microchip embedded in the passport that has your information in it. if you want totravel as an american citizen, there's nothing that you can do to avoid that. you can't optout of it. the government has it. i was thinking today in the airport, the tsahas been trying a new system to monitor the length of security lines by capturing theip address-like thing that your cell phone emits, and using that to track how long you'rewaiting in line as you pass through the system.
of course, you know, that's what they saythat it's for. it used to be that you could just come outand look at how long the line was and then put more people on. but you could turn your phone off. there arecertain things. but to evan's point, you have to do more and more things that are inconvenientto try and insulate yourself from those kinds of things. and i was having this thought while i waswalking past this whole bank of ibm ads, which probably a lot of people have seen. they're,i think, called the smarter planet ad campaign that they're running that says like, "riverswill tell you when they're going to flood"
or all these things. this idea that information can be used productivelyto improve the world. one of the things in the ad campaign, it says,"how do we use information consumers these days? now tell us what they want." and theidea of this implicit pronoun of "us", as if we're, like, telling companies what itis that we want. essentially, we just have to realize, i think,that that is how corporate america sees the information that we volunteer, as a communicationthat can be used as a resource for them the same way government or investigators can,to tailor products to us, which i think is kind of fascinating.
evan: well, it's also funny if you took themost dystopian science fiction scenario and said, "what if we all had a chip embeddedin us that had a distinct number that said where we were at all times?" that's your cellphone. peter: right. evan: and one of the other speakers of thecia said this. he said the cell phone is the ultimate identity tracker because, you know,there's lots of databases that say who you are, your date of birth, and all these things,but the cell phone is the one thing that has a unique identifier that's always with youall the time. so, it can verify your location in additionto your identity. now, you can give someone
else your cell phone and throw them off, butmost people don't do that. most people are using their cell phone. evan: so, if you really want privacy, youprobably shouldn't be carrying around something that's a unique geographic locator to yourexact position that can be uncovered by almost anyone, including not just a government investigator. evan: in fact, i'm doing another story nowthat involves a private investigator. so he's just a pi. he doesn't have any special powers.all he has is his own investigative skills, and he will get people's cell phone informationby walking into a sprint store, for example, and saying, "hey, i need these records, fromthis cell phone."
and, just like with those phone calls, thefirst clerk will say, "well, are you this person?" and he'll say, "no, i'm not thisperson. i'm an investigator. i'm a private investigator." and they'll say, "oh, well,i can't give you that" and he'll go to the next store, two blocks away. and eventually, one of the clerks will say,"oh, you're a private investigator? oh, i must be able to give you this information",will print out the bill and hand it to him. it's totally legal. peter: right. amazing. probably have timefor one or two more questions. oh, sorry, there's one right here.
woman 5: evan, it's like three things. didyou use phones at all? and how was this emotionally for you, like for a month? was it frazzling? and then also, was there any contingency planlike if you got in a car accident or something really bad happened where you would revealyour identity for health reasons besides gluten-free products? peter: phones. evan: phones. i did. i used pre-paid phones.i never used my own cell phone. as a matter of fact, the very first thing i did when ileft was i took the battery out of my cell phone, because your cell phone's actuallypotentially trackable even if it's not on
if the battery's in it. so, i took the battery out of my cell phoneand it never went back in. so i used pre-paid phones, which are also traceable; if someoneknows the number, they can trace them, so i used three or four. i would dump them periodicallyif i thought that the number had become public. so, the second one was emotionally. it wasvery up and down, it was a very weird experience, obviously, and it was very isolating, becausei wasn't communicating with people, my friends and my family. so, things like being really paranoid, i didn'thave anyone around to say "you're acting like an idiot" or "no one's really flying a helicopter,looking for you." i was in my own, really
inside my own internal world, and that createda lot of freak-outs that, in your normal life, probably wouldn't happen. then the third thing was for emergencies.well, a couple of things. i tried to carry my real id with me everywhere i went, likeif i went jogging or something. i didn't want to, like, get hit by a car and then end upin a hospital and be like "john doe" somewhere in america. so, i wanted to give my family a way to contactme, in case they had an emergency or they needed to get in touch with me, so i mailedthem a pre-paid phone. and that prepaid phone was programmed withone number, which was the number for one pre-paid
phone that i had. so these were the only twophones that would interact. they were paid for with cash. i put a note in there to myparents, saying "if anything happens, use this phone to call my phone." the day that i left, we did have like a familyemergency of sorts. my mom called my pre-paid phone from her real cell phone. so, even my carefully laid plans... and idumped that phone after the first day, so actually, after the first day, they had noway to contact me. but the weird thing was, they were actuallyreally worried about my safety and that ended up being not a concern at all, partly becauseit was so oddly public, the whole thing. there
wasn't an issue of like something happeningto me, someone coming after me or something like that. man 7: yeah, i was just wondering if stephenking's... i'm right here. evan: oh, there you are. man 7: stephen king's 1970s book "the runningman" has any influence on...? evan: it didn't, because i have not actuallyread it. but i'm aware that it's deeply relevant. but i haven't read it. man 7: it makes sense, because it does bringout a lot of the paranoia stuff, and possibly if you'd read it, you may have chose not todo it.
man 7: that kind of a book. evan: i'm not sure then if it's good or badthat i haven't read it. but, yeah, it's probably good because it might have deterred me. peter: well, that seems like a good placeto end. thank you all for coming. evan: thanks a lot. [applause continues until end]
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