For Tax Day only, we are switching from our regular formatted programming to bring you a special talk with Evan Ratliff, a co-editor for WIRED Magazine who created an assignment to disappear with strategic aims to not be found.

WIRED's sponsored contest had escalating tiers of money for the digital bounty hunter who could track down and catch Ratliff in his remote locations. Evan was in and out of disguises for the duration of his extended assignment. He toured with a band, became a granola hippie and even adopted a disguise as balding stereotype in a suit to evade getting "caught" for prize money. He shares a very unique story of how he did his best to evade being actively identified by those who tracked him down with arcane and creative digital clues.

Relax, as much as you can, in this moderately paranoid yet entertaining tale of public evasion.

ABOUT EVAN RATLIFF

Evan Ratliff is a freelance journalist whose writing appears in Wired magazine, The New Yorker, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Outside, Discover, Men’s Journal, New York, and many other publications. A contributing editor for Wired, he is the co-author of Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World (HarperCollins, 2005), about innovation and counterterrorism. A former fellow at both the International Reporting Project and the Japan Foreign Press Center, he has reported from Russia, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Brazil, and elsewhere on science and technology, the environment, terrorism, politics, and transnational crime.