Saul Goodman - Get Off the Grid! - Saul Goodman's Guide to Staying Off the Radar

Feels kinda exciting, doesn’t it? Woo-hoo! A new you! But before you dive into the deep end and start swimming to shores unknown, take a very hard look at the life you have right now, as you sit here. We’ve got to examine what we’re leaving so we can understand how to get gone.

Those everyday marks, the hoi polloi in the streets drinking bubble tea and taking selfies with their dogs, don’t realize they are happy little flies caught in a black widow’s web.

Ever seen a black widow’s web? The most deadly spider to ever ruin a rural trip to the outhouse makes this nasty-looking, haphazard death net in the most surreptitious nooks and crannies. None of that pretty Charlotte’s Web –looking spiral art: just a cloud of silk. Lot of dead bugs wrapped up in there, though. Life’s like that web, and whatever it is that has you ready to skedaddle is the black widow. And she’s always hungry.

The only way to understand what you’re doing is to take stock of all the threads that have you trapped in that predator’s nest. That’ll include our happy little list of flammable papers, like those pesky birth certificates.

And then: there are the digital threads. Go ahead. Park your name between a set of quotation marks in your favorite online search engine. Unless you’ve got a common name like “Bill Smith” or “Jane Jones,” chances are any number of the results kicked back to you will, in fact, be you. If you have social media, like Facebook or Twitter or Twitface—whatever—there are friend and family connections weaving you tighter into the Web. Your quotidian interactions with these folks leave behind a bread-crumb trail to be gobbled up by the powers-that-be.

Already getting the picture, I hope. To truly separate from that old life, you are going to have to get out your proverbial machete and chop right through that jungle of connections. More of them spring up to block your path every day! It’s not going to be easy, but you’ve got to face up to just how many cords need to be cut.

If you have additional licenses—law, business, marriage, guns, weed, scuba, etc.—those are all sets of silken threads vibrating under that imaginary spider’s feet.

Records for all these things are often readily searchable. It’s a lead-pipe cinch to look up a business license in a state database. A committed investigator with any agency—private or public—can study those records and suss out all sorts of salient details, like what your actual signature looks like. That’s in there if you signed the documents the kindly clerks at the state business registry thingy saw fit to turn into easily downloadable PDF documents. And hey, what about that marriage license? Or licenses? That’s a document and even better (or worse, for our purposes), another person who has plenty of information they might be willing to part with should one of the reasons you’re seeking a new name and life come a-knocking at their door.

Then there’s family. This is a crazy wrinkle, because if you are without blood relations, well hey, perhaps that’s a choice and good for you. If that’s the case, your situation would make our job here easier, because when you’re trying to escape an old life for a new, family ties may be some of the toughest to untangle.

Most folks have a tendency to talk to family with reckless abandon. You go away suddenly one day with no notice to Mom or Pop or even your brother, one of them might remember the time you openly fantasized about doing just that—leaving this crapfest rat race of a life behind with dreams of glory.

Getting off the grid requires you to be on your guard, all the time. Don’t get too comfortable. You’ve got to stay three steps ahead. Before you can even consider cutting loose and stepping off, you have to know where you’re escaping to. You’ve got to go set up your new home, in whatever form that may take.

Before I grab my hammer and start whacking the brass tacks of your new digs into place for you, it’s only fair I impart some of my own experience, give you some idea of how it works if you decide to involve another freelance contractor in this hootenanny. I’ll be really real with you: it’s sticky, spooky, and ’spensive… but an intermediary can help guide you on the yellow brick road to your very own Oz.

Let’s say you’re in a tough position. You’ve gotten yourself into a tangle with some unsavory characters working on a dangerous project, and man, can you ever see the electrified piss lightning bolts on the horizon. You don’t have to be psychic to know how many things are falling apart. So what’s to do?

The solution is to get away, to get anywhere. Maybe you could find a job working fast food at a mall in a snowy Midwestern city—because who the hell would think to look for a fugitive there, right?

Maybe in this situation you simply don’t have time to sit down with a book like this, or noodle around on the Dark Web. Remember when you were in high school and you had the sneaking suspicion that all the cool kids were hanging out and brewing moonshine without you? Well, if they weren’t then—they are now, virtually and anonymously on the shady digital alleys of the Dark Web. Prepubescent moonshine is probably the tamest thing you could acquire there.

If you don’t have time to wander the maze-like cesspool of the secret Internet to find an escape hatch from your life: that’s when you will probably want to start hunting for someone local who already has his or her own nefarious sources and some practice providing others with vetted, authentic papers that the happy folks at border patrol wouldn’t blink twice at if you wanted to go on a little jaunt to Canada to stock up on maple syrup or maple whiskey or maple lima beans, whatever it is you’re in the mood to eat.

We can call these friendly and helpful merchants “identity brokers,” though that’s a confusing term because it might also refer to the scum of the earth services that harvest the e-mail address from your “Coffee Cake Digest” subscriptions and shop it around to a million other mailing lists that you’re probably not interested in (unless you like your spam with a side of “GROW TEN INCHES IN TEN HOURS TO PLEASE YOUR MAN!”)—sometimes those services are called identity brokers, too.

Our brand of identity brokers are a little bit like drug dealers, except instead of hallucinogenic lollipops, they’re doling out passports and IDs. They frequently do their work for nice people born out of town who seek to grab that brass ring of American citizenship. Colombians anxious to try Seattle’s Best Coffee, Russians looking to ditch the fur boots for a pair of white Nikes, English folks who discover they’re Anglophobes—the usual suspects. Here’s how that might play out…

Let’s say our neighborhood ID retailer is Sam. If you don’t know who your neighborhood ID retailer is, just nonchalantly wander under the bleachers at your local high school and ask the chain-smoking, fifteen-year-old sipping from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper sack. She’ll tell you who has the goods, for a price.

Sam learns that Ricardo in Mexico City is seeking to shed the skin of his old life in the ciudad and start anew in Albuquerque. New Mexico sounds like just the place to be his new Mexico! Sam has a connection in Puerto Rico—which is a U.S. territory, for those of you who missed that day in your elementary school geography class—and his guy in San Juan has amassed a tasty collection of vital papers. We’re talking social security cards, birth certificates, and other personal docs donated willingly (or more likely, without the consent of) by-God true American citizens. Puerto Rico ships off this solid info from people who may not even know it’s been stolen or are too dead to care, and then our fine businessman Sam hands over a matching set of social security card and birth certificate to Ricardo for a cool $2,000.