washamericom
Gold Member
- Jun 19, 2010
- 13,703
- 1,907
Ayers Fugitive Days was quoted:
After the Baltimore fiasco, stealing ID was forbidden. Instead we began to build ID sets around documents as flimsy as a fishing license or a laminated card available in a Times Square novelty shop called Official ID. We soon figured out that the deepest and most foolproof ID had a government-issued Social Security card at its heart, and the best source of those were dead-baby birth certificates. I spent impious days over the next several months tramping through rural cemeteries in Iowa and Wisconsin, Illinois and North Dakota,searching for those sad little markers of people born between 1940 and 1950 who had died between 1945 and 1955. The numbers were surprising: two in one graveyard, a cluster of fourteen in another. Those poor souls had typically been issued birth certificatesavailable to us at any county courthouse for a couple of bucks and a simple form with information I could copy from the death announcement at the archive of the local paperbut they had never applied for a Social Security card.
Collecting those birth certificates became a small industry, and within a year we had over a hundred. For years I was a paper-made Joseph Brown, and then an Anthony Lee, remarkably durable identities. My on-paper official residences: a transient hotel in San Francisco and a warehouse in New York.
After the Baltimore fiasco, stealing ID was forbidden. Instead we began to build ID sets around documents as flimsy as a fishing license or a laminated card available in a Times Square novelty shop called Official ID. We soon figured out that the deepest and most foolproof ID had a government-issued Social Security card at its heart, and the best source of those were dead-baby birth certificates. I spent impious days over the next several months tramping through rural cemeteries in Iowa and Wisconsin, Illinois and North Dakota,searching for those sad little markers of people born between 1940 and 1950 who had died between 1945 and 1955. The numbers were surprising: two in one graveyard, a cluster of fourteen in another. Those poor souls had typically been issued birth certificatesavailable to us at any county courthouse for a couple of bucks and a simple form with information I could copy from the death announcement at the archive of the local paperbut they had never applied for a Social Security card.
Collecting those birth certificates became a small industry, and within a year we had over a hundred. For years I was a paper-made Joseph Brown, and then an Anthony Lee, remarkably durable identities. My on-paper official residences: a transient hotel in San Francisco and a warehouse in New York.
