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How to Disappear Completely



Thanks to our friends at Skeptic Tank, you now have everything you need to disappear in America without a trace - or at least enough to kickstart the process. It’s a longish essay on how to drop out of society without anybody following your tracks. You’ll have to decide for yourself how effective their techniques are though.

Whoa… is this true?

Satellites can bounce LASER light off of your windows and, by measuring the minute distance differences between a vibrating window and the satellite, reconstruct your speech — from orbit! I don’t know how much this process costs yet it was demonstrated for PBS some years ago so it may not be all that expensive. The quality of the audio is poor but it can be understood.

I’ve definitely heard that you can do this with some device if you’re, say, standing out in the bushes and pointing said device at my window. But from space? Wow. If anybody has leads on this technology or the PBS special mentioned here, I’d be curious to find out more.

[Found via Occult Design.]







8 Reader Responses

  1. sparkwidget Says:
    September 15th, 2005 at 10:32 pm

    I totally used one of these laser listening devices to eavesdrop on mob bosses in the smash console hit, Splinter Cell.

  2. alistair Says:
    September 15th, 2005 at 11:14 pm

    the physics is sound but to do it from space would need technology and software and that would be a secret. there is actually a cheap transducer available commercially, that turns any flat surface into a speaker.

  3. JK Says:
    September 16th, 2005 at 12:27 am

    You’d need airborne nanotech repeaters to do that shit bro.

  4. aDude Says:
    September 16th, 2005 at 12:52 am

    I can’t see any way this could work from a satellite. Think how stars twinkle when you see them, thats due to their light being disturbed as it passes through the atmosphere. If you were trying to receive a message carried by tiny variations in the brightness of the star the signal would be totally swamped by the noise of the twinkling. Of course if I thought the NSA had a reason to listen in, I’d crank some AC/DC during any sensitive conversations just to add to the noise they’d have to deal with. Even more of a problem is the angle- how does a satellite in the sky bounce a laser off a vertically oriented window back to itself, or even another satellite, without a carefully placed mirror near the ground? If they have to place a mirror there, why not set up the whole rig there? Which brings up perhaps the most important point: why is having the laser bug on a satellite more scary than having them bug you from a van, a nearby building or even a bush?

  5. Tim Boucher Says:
    September 16th, 2005 at 2:06 am

    Well regardless of whether that part is accurate, the rest of the article is really what people ought to be focusing on…

  6. alistair Says:
    September 16th, 2005 at 10:47 am

    the message i get from the article is that is shit on the road, especially if you are covert. decide to grow in the community and then you won`t need to run in the first place. there is a lot of desperate stuff in that article that can be dealt with more effectively by facing the challenges provided. running is a natural response but never builds anything of value. granted there is a lack of leadership and a fragmenting of family values, the glue that binds communities, but we all know what we need most, that`s what make us most upset in the first place. it`s not an easy road, this life, but it gets better for those who are willing to make a stand.
    wounds heal. deep one`s take longer. we are the healers though. given time.

  7. james Says:
    September 16th, 2005 at 2:37 pm

    Satellite technology is daunting, but you’d be surprised how much surveillance and intelligence work can be done with just vibrations and sound. The Russians during the Cold War specialized in brilliant, cost-effective innovations with espionage. They didn’t have the budget to compete with us so they did the next best thing: they nurtured their brightest minds by not sending them off to Gulags to die.

    Read up on Leon Theremin– he’s an interesting character in this respect.

  8. Fu Manchu Says:
    September 18th, 2005 at 1:01 pm

    Some of you may find this information useful: http://www.flashback.se/archive/100_ways_to_disappear.txt

    It’s contains different advice, mostly geared towards a person trying to escape ‘legal obligations’ (child custody, IRS, etc).



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