Wired's Evan Ratliff has a good feature up today on the difficulty of escaping your identity in the modern database nation, tracking Matthew Alan Sheppard, a middle-manager who started dipping into the company credit card to finance his penchant for electronic toys, and who then decided to fake his own death, wait for his (unknowing) wife to collect the insurance, and then bring her and his kid to Mexico and open a tequila factory.
What's most interesting about this is how little esoteric tech there is in catching underground desaparecidos — tap a phone or two, look in their Google caches, wait for them to use their SSN or register their kids at school (how Ratliff Sheppard got caught). The database nation turns out to be a most banal panopticon.
Two weeks before, when Sheppard sat down to formulate a plan to fake his death, he'd been armed only with Google and LexisNexis. Stumbling on an article about Steve Fossett, the explorer whose plane disappeared in September 2007 and whose remains were yet to be discovered, Sheppard concluded that even without a body, Monica would likely be able to obtain a legal determination of death and thereby collect his company-issued life insurance policy — worth $1.3 million. He pored over recent reports of missing persons and faked deaths, looking for strategies to emulate and pitfalls to avoid.
That, in fact, was how he'd come up with the idea of leaving his BlackBerry conspicuously at a gas station on the Friday before his disappearance. It was a classic misdirection: Someone would grab the phone and start using it, Sheppard hoped, and any cop who didn't buy the drowning would trace the phone to some petty thief — while Sheppard's real trail faded. (The ruse backfired, it seems, when the thief sent a few messages and then quit, convincing Sergeant Roberson that Sheppard was alive.)
