Archive of Chat With Evan Ratliff About His Time on the Run

Original Link  http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/12/chat-with-evan-ratliff

2:54
Nicholas Thompson: Welcome to the chat with Evan Ratliff about his time on the run. We’ll begin in six minutes at 3pm sharp. Have your questions ready. I’ll also be submitting questions from the #askevan twitter feed and from my email inbox.

To refresh your memories, here’s his story: http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/
2:59
Nicholas Thompson: Let’s start with a questions lots of people have asked: what were your fake aliases, were you ever in contact with @thrimpjohnson, and who was the mole who tipped you off that hunters were staking out a bookstore in Las Vegas
3:01
EvanRatliff: Hello everybody. As for aliases, my main one was of course James Donald Gatz, and variations on that (I was going by JD in the last week, in real life). The only actual fake mole twitter account I had was @nabratliff, and after people figured out they could exclude me from private chat rooms by making everyone verify identities with Nick, I couldn’t make much of it.
3:02
EvanRatliff: As for the mole who tipped me off to Vegas, I don’t know who it was. It was as anonymous to me as it was to the folks in the chat room. The mole who helped me most was Rich Reder.
3:02
[Comment From vache]
Congrats on your monumental journey, question, from the experience have you adapted any uses such as internet surfing and using gift cards, in your daily life? thanks again
3:04
EvanRatliff: Thanks! I’m not actually a huge privacy buff in my real life, but I have continued with a few things. For instance, I still use TrackMeNot, which is a Firefox plug-in that masks your Google searches. I’m also a lot more careful with my passwords than I used to be. I’ve got different sets of ones for different types of services.
3:04
Nicholas Thompson: Question from Twitter: what was the plan for the motorcycle??
3:06
EvanRatliff: I figured if I got the motorcycle license, it would at least be a useful bit of disinformation. But I did originally plan to try and buy a bike and use that as transportation at my final destination (which was New Orleans all along). I couldn’t find a decent one cheap enough to afford with my remaining cash, though, and by then people had already found it so it probably would’ve been unwise anyway.
3:06
[Comment From Mark]
i cant remember, did you tell your girlfriend or fiance that you were leaving on an assignment?
3:07
EvanRatliff: I did tell my girlfriend that I was leaving, and she knew the nature of the story. But she didn’t know where I was going, nor did she know anything about where I was or what I was up to during the month.
3:08
Nicholas Thompson: From Twitter: Memphis airport: JDG disguise but EDR ID – Security’s reaction? Your fears/backup plan?
3:08
Nicholas Thompson: Translation: When Evan flew from Memphis, he had to buy the ticket under his real name and use his real ID. But he was disguised. Could that have led to trouble?
3:09
EvanRatliff: I actually did get a second glance from airport security, I felt like, because I looked so different from the picture on my real license. But I figured, who is going to challenge a person who has lost a lot of hair, demanding to know why they don’t match their photo. That’s just rude. And it had the added benefit that maybe they weren’t really looking at my name that closely.
3:10
[Comment From david]
Have you sold the film rights yet?
3:10
EvanRatliff: No, feel free to bid…
3:10
[Comment From Guest]
How did you navigate selecting personal friends that you could trust not to turn you in? e.g. the friend you met up with in SLC
3:12
EvanRatliff: I picked two very old friends who I just knew would never say a word to anyone, and in any case would love the adventure of it more than the money. In fact, the friend I met in SLC was WAY more paranoid than me when he got there. He’d been freaking out about people following him. The other thing I did was when I first made contact with both of them, I basically just showed up with no warning. I didn’t give them advance notice before it all started, just to be safe.
3:12
[Comment From Guest]
Do you think hunters would have recognized you at Atlanta airport in your disguise? From my brief field attempt, it seemed incredibly difficult guessing at someone’s identity from your 2d mugshot – then mapping that to someone in person in 3d and going up to them and saying fluke! Your ATL disguise seemed pretty amazing.
3:14
EvanRatliff: Good question, so hard to know but I will say this: when my friend in Atlanta first saw me, he went right by without recognizing me. So judging by that, I think it would have been very hard for someone who’d just seen my picture to pick me out. Now, if they’d already thought: he could’ve shaved the top of his head, maybe.
3:15
EvanRatliff: Also, a lot of hunters told me afterward how hard it was just to walk up to random people and say “fluke.” It’s a very awkward social interaction. So I had that in my favor.
3:15
Nicholas Thompson: From Twitter: what did you ship via USPS for $83-ish??
3:16
EvanRatliff: I shipped some CDs to myself in New York, media mail. And a few old random books home to my parents in Atlanta.
3:16
[Comment From Jeff]
If you were to try this again, do you think it would be easier or harder to succeed – given the interest it generated the first go-around?
3:17
EvanRatliff: Interesting! I think it’d be harder because I’ve probably used up my best disguises. So assuming there were again enough people interested to actually get on the ground and look for me, I’d be at a disadvantage. On the tech side, I’d lock things down and keep them locked down way more than I did, so in that sense I could probably keep people off my trail a bit more.
3:17
[Comment From Guest]
What were your first thoughts when Leach said Fluke and just after?
3:18
EvanRatliff: “Fuck.”
3:19
EvanRatliff: And then, it was suddenly very surreal. Nobody had called me by my real name in almost a month, and here I was with these guys (who were very cool) that I didn’t know, who were high-fiving about depriving me of $3000. It was a bummer, but also kind of hard to get my head around.
3:19
[Comment From Guest]
Was it fun seeing the misinformation in #vanish? What were the most satisfying moments watching the #vanish discussion?
3:21
EvanRatliff: I loved all the misinformation. At first I’d planned to have a ton of fake Twitter handles and mix everybody up, but aside from the problem of verifying identity (discussed above), it turned out I didn’t really need to. There was just so much information floating around. The best part was definitely when I was in LA and about to leave, and people were calling restaurants, driving around. I was both completely paranoid and really thrilled by it.
3:21
[Comment From Guest]
Were you actually planning to go to the bookstore hunters had staked out? I never understood the connection.
3:22
EvanRatliff: No, I’d left Vegas for good on the 16th. But that was still great lead chasing on their part, given that my office was there. The book was purchased at the Washington University bookstore in St. Louis.
3:22
[Comment From Jeff]
Did you find that your limited financial resources were a major stumbling block for you? Would double the cash have ensured that you would have remained “gone” longer?
3:23
EvanRatliff: To the first question: yes. I was always concerned about money, and when you are dealing with a limited pool of cash, it’s like your ability to hide is draining away each day. To the second question, it wasn’t really what did me in, in the end. Although greed was a factor, since I wanted the additional prize money that would have come from going to the book reading.
3:23
[Comment From Guest]
Do you worry that your story might actually encourage people to run away? Or do you figure that they would do it on their own even without hearing about your story?
3:25
EvanRatliff: I don’t worry necessarily that it will cause them to run away. I think that it tries to show how dumping your life and starting again is actually not particularly fun. I do worry that the techniques are the same ones used by people that are hiding from the law, or have generally done something bad. But, nothing I learned is really particularly secret; anyone could come up with it. And I’ve heard from people who have had to abandon their lives and go into hiding because of stalkers, and they seemed to appreciate it.
3:26
[Comment From Mark]
You had mentioned that you were trying to make some friends in NO. Did you and how was it knowing you were essentially lying to them about who you were. Assuming of course you had to keep secret who you really were. Great story.
3:28
EvanRatliff: Thanks Mark. I really was just at the very casual acquantaince level with people in NO, at the point I got caught. With the people I worked with at the Superdome, for example, I never really had to get into my background, we just talked about the issues of the moment: how to get the damn nacho cheese bag into the dispenser. I was giving a fake name and some vague information about how long I’d lived there, and even that felt bad. I went back and apologized to everyone I could find.
3:28
[Comment From Guest]
Nick: Have sales of the Gone issue been strong compared to other issues? The cover is very intriguing…
3:28
Nicholas Thompson: We don’t know yet. But the feedback from readers has been out-of-this-world good. Folks love the story, and they love the cover.
3:28
[Comment From Guest]
Evan, did you have an idea of how you’d been tracked to New Orleans (given your gatz twitter feed) or were you bewildered at first? What was your first guess about how you’d been tracked?
3:30
EvanRatliff: Totally bewildered. In fact, from the information I was getting, people didn’t even seem close. They were either stuck on Atlanta, and I thought they would assume I’d stay there for a few days. Soembody was saying Houston, but I hadn’t seen anyone suggest NO for at least a week. I also had an Amtrak ticket from Atlanta to DC which surfaced later in the day I got caught. That was meant to send everyone north.
3:30
[Comment From Lindsey]
Did anyone try to contact you trying to do business with Bespect?
3:31
EvanRatliff: Oh, and my first guess was just that NakedPizza had done it alone, after I started following their Twitter feed, and somehow put it together.
3:31
EvanRatliff: Ha, no, no business. They should have, we do good work. I did have a couple people actually look at the site to verify my identity (including one landlord). They praised it as an interesting-sounding business.
3:31
[Comment From Guest]
How did people you fooled react when you recontacted them? Did they all have a sense there was something diffrent about you?
3:33
EvanRatliff: Everybody was incredibly cool about it, even letting me use their names in the story. The level of suspicion varied. The people I rented offices from had no idea, they barely even saw me anyway, and I paid on time. The Hermit Thrushes guys (the band) always thought I was a bit odd. They told me they noticed I’d dyed my goatee, and they wondered, “who the hell does THAT?” But I wasn’t much trouble and I paid for gas, so they didn’t mind if I was a little off.
3:33
[Comment From Guest]
Evan, has #vanish helped/hurt your career as a tech writer? Is this opening doors to you that might earlier have been harder to crack?
3:35
EvanRatliff: Uh…Nick? I’m not sure. It’s gotten a lot of attention, way more than I could have possibly hoped for, which is really nice. I’m still working through old assignments I had to put aside in order to do it, so I haven’t been out there pitching new stories yet. I guess I’ll see at that point. But I think to most editors, it’s probably just another story.
3:35
[Comment From Jeff]
Did you ever figure out the coincidence between Gatz following @PhoenixArizona which happened to be run by the person who built the sandwich board blog template used by @mescad?
3:37
EvanRatliff: As far as I can tell, that was totally random coincidence. I also never figured out how, as I was traveling through Texas, one of the hunters, @chriscorp randomly ended up following my @jdgatz Twitter feed. I completely panicked, deleted a couple of tweets, blocked him, and then put up fake ones saying I was heading back West. They are still up there. Afterward he and I couldn’t figure out how it happened, but he never noticed it.
3:37
[Comment From JJT]
When you did not use your proxy laptop to surf the web and revealed IP address info as you visited Facebook – was that a mistake fueled by the inconvenience of connecting through the proxy, or were you pushing the envelope a little? Lessons learned?
3:39
EvanRatliff: I’ve never had a really clear answer, even in my own head, for that. It was definitely fueled in part by inconvenience. I tried to pare down the number of sites that required using that level of security, because it was so slow. And I really did think that Facebook apps probably couldn’t track IPs without some approval from FB. It’s something I hadn’t researched, so obviously that was just a fuck up. Partly, I was pushing the envelope perhaps, because I had a sense all along of wanted to make it the best possible story.
3:39
[Comment From Jeff]
Do you regret having walked up to do the Amanda Congon interview? That seemed like a big risk that she might recognize you and it was a key part of you getting caught. Why’d you bother using a current photo on your FB page as you could have gotten away with an Avatar?
3:40
EvanRatliff: I definitely don’t regret the interview. That was one of the most fun parts for me. I definitely do regret not changing my FB photo once I’d released the video. It seems obvious now, of course, but there was so much going on that I didn’t stop to think: Now that the video is out, change the photo.
3:40
[Comment From Alex]
Great mix of journalism/experiential media and ARG. This work coupled with the J.J. Abrams Mystery Box issue is changing the game for how print should be consumed for some time. Bravo!
3:40
[Comment From Lindsey]
To what extent was your transport planned out before you left? Example, did you connect with the Hermit Thrushes before or after you went on the run? The round trip to SLC also seemed like a quick turnaround.
3:40
EvanRatliff: Thanks Alex!
3:43
EvanRatliff: I had a planned route, but it got mucked up right at the beginning. I was going to take the train from LA to Austin, originally. But I hadn’t realized that the Amtrak ID requirements were as strict as they were — I actually tried to buy a ticket and got shot down. Later I came up with a workaround. But at the time I thought trains were out, so I posted on several ride share sites. The Hermit Thrushes called, I’d never met them or even known about them before that moment. The SLC thing I planned along the way, after I’d made initial contact with my accomplice (in St. Louis, in the few hours I was there, I showed up at his office).
3:43
[Comment From Jotham Polashek]
Where and what did you eat? Was money a big constraint on the quality of the food? Did you always have to eat in private to avoid detection?
3:44
EvanRatliff: I ate out every single meal for the entire time, which seemed only fair. It did make money an issue, but my love for taco truck tacos is pretty much unbounded, so that and coffee and whisky were my only serious consumption expenses.
3:44
[Comment From Jeff]
My thought about you not realizing that a Facebook application could track IPs is just more an example that it’s always one thing a fugitive doesn’t know or doesn’t realize that leads to their being caught. It’s probably quite difficult to know everything you need to know – especially in this day and age of video surveillance, wire tapping and social networks.
3:45
EvanRatliff: Hey Jeff! Yeah, agreed. That’s the PI/investigator’s old saying, “we can make 1000 mistakes and you only have to make one.” Still, I should’ve known that one, I feel like.
3:45
[Comment From Guest]
Evan, did you tell the Hermit Thrushes Don was heading to NASA?
3:46
EvanRatliff: Ha, no. That was their conception. Their performances are part stand-up comedy and they tell crazy untrue stories about the band in their radio shows, so it fit.
3:46
[Comment From Guest]
Were you watching the Bespect tumblr log?
3:47
EvanRatliff: At first I was, a bit. But then I didn’t really have a means to crack what Jeff Reifman cracked, which was linking the visitors to actual people. So it wasn’t that useful to me, and I quit.
3:47
[Comment From vache]
Do you think the hunters discovered your communication between the editor? and if they used this to their advantage?
3:48
EvanRatliff: No, I don’t think anybody found that. If they had, it actually wouldn’t have been much help. It was mostly me bitching to Nick about this and that rule we’d set up, maybe a couple times a week.
3:48
[Comment From Felipe D.]
Do you feel that those last challenges that you were faced with made it even more difficult? I love how, even though this was a game the level of anxiety you felt was so real. Makes you really think about the people who are doing this for real.
3:50
EvanRatliff: Definitly. I still believe that without the last challenges, things could’ve been different. But I think, as you’re saying, they did simulate a real aspect to disappearing. You have to make those kinds of choices to expose yourself, and really there were many every day. These just had a higher reward potential for me.
3:50
Nicholas Thompson: Your editor had all of your bank and credit card information. Were you ever worried that he would drain your accounts and hightail it to Barbados? It would have been hard for you to catch him while you were bouncing around mid-Texas in the back of the Hermit Thrush van.
3:50
EvanRatliff: If he had drained my bank accounts, he probably would’ve had to hitch a ride himself to get anywhere. Certainly wouldn’t have gone far in Barbados.
3:50
[Comment From Jeff]
Nick, what was the biggest surprise to you about how all this played out and what was the most fun?
3:51
Nicholas Thompson: I was most surprised by the level of interest. When we started, I feared that no one would care. And several times as the hunt went on, i feared that people would drop out.
3:51
Nicholas Thompson: Evan has to go in a second. So, last question, from Twitter: what did you learn from this experience?
3:54
EvanRatliff: Damn live editing. Seriously, I’m asked this in every media interview but really the answer is more complicated than a soundbyte. I didn’t really learn whether you can or can’t do it, or whether you would or wouldn’t like it. I think what I really figured out is that there is a weird kind of discipline and emotional distance that you would need to do something like this. Some people out there problably have in spades. I’ve got some of it, but not enough.
3:55
EvanRatliff: Ok, everybody. Thanks a lot for the questions, and for reading. This one was truly a fully interactive story, and it was mostly other people’s efforts that made it what it was.
3:55
Nicholas Thompson: Thank you everybody!
3:56
[Comment From Felipe D.]
Congratulations to Evan on the amazing article and to Wired to have the guts to create these kind of interactive experiments! Continue on this route. You guys are the salvation to print!