Disappearing

Disappearing

   It's not that easy to disappear, that is, vanish without anyone finding you, at least not as easy as the movies portray it.  Last year, a reporter from Wired attempted this (Wired is more or less a layperson's technology magazine about how we communicate and advances in the field of computing), and challenged readers to find him.  The difficulty of this was that this was a person who specialized in knowing how today's tracking methods and cookies work, so off went his cell phone and his computer, although he did leave a few clues on social media, and...he was found.  Which was interesting since the media portrays satellites and the NSA and Verizon and who know what else collecting reams and reams of data on everyone...but not quite.

   Over the years, there have been countless cases of people just vanishing, some coming from fame and money such as Everett Ruess (whose family was very wealthy, along the lines of William Randolph Hearst) and Amelia Earhart, who was recently featured in last month's issue of Smithsonian.  But those disappearances were decades ago, a time without the extensive GPS and satellite tracking technology that today comes with each cell phone and exercise band.  Still, this begs the question (in case the memory of it has vanished from your thoughts) how do you make an entire Boeing 777 filled with 239 passengers and crew just disappear?  Theories abound and this was even more extensively written about yesterday by author Jeff Wise in NY Magazine. 

   Talking on the radio about his article, he mentioned how private Boeing is about the possibility of their satellite tracking being tampered with, or even shut off (as with Amelia Earhart, one theory has the plane being shot down by the military tracking it as it changed course and would not respond).  But it all brings up a larger question, can tracking of our tracking data be blocked, or turned off, or even altered, as was one theory in the missing Malaysia jet?  This was the title story in a recent issue of The New Yorker, involving the difficult process of removing information already "out there" on the Internet.  As you'll read, the decision for this sort of information removal rests mainly with the large search and social media engines, sites such as Google and Facebook.  Fielding nearly 120,000 requests for information removal, information that is sometimes viewed as damaging, Google extensively reviews and has agreed to about half of the requests.  But suppose a request came from someone higher up, say a Google executive or a wealthy donor or an old Senator with influence (as part of the article hints at).  Would such "disappearing" informational links be granted?  And how far ahead (if any) is the military's ability in all this?

   The delicate dance between Silicon Valley and the government working together is touch and go, many firms (notably Verizon and Comcast) being viewed as cooperating a bit too much and a bit too quickly in providing data on its customers to government agencies.  But it's been a slow road, as mentioned in an op-ed piece from Bloomberg Businessweek last July:  Microsoft  began seriously lobbying only after it ran into antitrust problems in the mid-1990s. Google set up a single lobbyist in the capital in 2005, explaining on a company blog that it “seems that policymaking and regulatory activity in Washington, D.C., affect Google and our users more every day.” Last year the tech sector was the fourth-largest spender on D.C. lobbying, a few million dollars behind the oil and gas industry. 

   But that is all neither here nor there.  Whether we are sitting on a jumbo jet or talking on our cell phone, we find ourselves basically powerless.  We (for the most part) can't fly a plane, much less alter its satellite's communication systems, just as we feel unable to totally delete all the information on our phones or our computers (notice how cleaning programs on such devices don't really "wipe" or totally delete anything unless you go a step further and install a "shredding" program that will supposedly jumble your files into unreadability).  But disappear?  If you really want to try and grasp that possibility, you need only look at the current issue of National Geographic.

   In a continuing series of the crisis of refugees fleeing war or famine, author Paul Salopek writes:
What happens when you become a war refugee?  You walk.  True, in order to save your life—for example, as militants assault your village—you might first speed away by whatever conveyance possible.  In the family car.  Or in your neighbor’s fruit truck.  Aboard a stolen bus.  Inside a cart pulled behind a tractor.  But eventually: a border.  And it is here that you must walk.  Why?  Because men in uniforms will demand to see your papers.  What, no papers?  Did you leave them behind?  Did you grab your child’s hand instead, in that last frantic moment of flight?  Or perhaps you packed a bag with food, with money?  It doesn’t matter.  Get out of your vehicle.  Stand over there.  Wait.  Now, papers or no papers, your life as a refugee genuinely starts: on foot, in the attitude of powerlessness...The United Nations calculates that by the end of 2013, more than 51 million people worldwide were displaced because of warfare, violence, and persecution (the largest number of people displaced since World War II).  More than half were women and children.  Among Syrian refugees in Turkey, the proportion of women and children zooms to 75 percent.  The men stay behind to fight or protect property.

   Even Editor Susan Goldberg felt compelled to write about the issue, talking with a woman named Botol:  Botol is from Syria.  Her husband fought against the Bashar al Assad regime in that country’s ongoing civil war.  More than a year ago he disappeared.  Maybe the government arrested him, she says.  Maybe it was the Islamic State (IS) militants.  She believes he is dead...Botol won’t talk to Paul (the author of the above article), but the other women in the house—Aklas, Reem, and Hella—will.  Their words spill out in a chaos of conflicting emotions, unimaginable losses, and palpable relief.
Botol speaks for them all. “Thank God I am here,” she said.  “Syria is not a good place anymore.  But this is an unbearable life.  Very difficult.  Very hard.  And it won’t get better, because once you lose something, you can’t get it back.”

   For millions, disappearing has been and for the most part, still is, quite easy.  You stay behind and then one day, one year, you are simply gone.  Perhaps one day, the world will know, your secrets will be unearthed.  But for now, whether it makes the news or not, it still seems that making hundreds and thousands of people disappear, is much easier than just losing track of one person...or an airplane.