I love it! A topic that I like to talk about, and I'm allowed to post!! I've found my spot for the moment.
Looks like there are already some detailed posts so I won't (or rather, don't have to) go over all the mundane stuff.
It is already hard and rapidly rapidly getting harder to be untraceable, as the arms race between privacy and law enforcement plays out. 20 years ago, it was so simple to tap a phone, but also so insanely boring and inefficient because so little was said on the phone. FF to today, almost everyone has a complete life record in their pocket which is actively recording what you do and broadcasting it out. So the stakes are 1000x higher but the privacy laws aren't so much. (They have evolved somewhat, but never as fast as tech. Like the federal judge who went along with "checking the box on a TOS, sure, that should have same weight as a carefully considered and signed paper contract....) We've got so many simple blunders at that level to fix, man, we are behind on this stage where we should be setting sane, basic, rules of the game.
Because we're walking around creating these digital tracks of our identity, and immediately broadcasting a lot of it for storage, with most of it stashed in various places on us soil (well, if you're 'merican like me). You already lost the untraceable game pretty badly
Oh yeah, same device is broadcasting your ID plus your location is what we _know_ it is doing. The best hackers I know are still unearthing chipset/bios layers of mysterious hypervisors which are doing... some other stuff. Like, if you don't know what Intel ME is, go read about that, and then realize we have not really gotten to the bottom of that barrel, while the barrel was being built larger and deeper as the PC era became the phone era. You know how, when you learn the secrets of 20 years ago, they are invariably orders of magnitude further "out there" than anything you would have believed at the time. Right?
OK before this gets too long and boring: my 2nd most favorite answer: sure, you can be untraceable instantly. Drop your ID and don't give anyone a reason to trace you. Live as a homeless man on the street. Most will do the opposite of trace you. Your topic implies more than being untraceable I think. You want to have identity and wealth and reasons for people to want to trace you, and also be untraceable. Short answer is no, you're shedding dna as you walk around on top of the aforementioned problems with the mini supercomputers we carry, without knowing much about what they are doing in our pockets LOL.
But my _most_ favorite answer to the question is yes, you can be the person who they're looking for. You can't win in the tech arms race, but you can create a situation where it appears someone else is the guy we're after! Maybe get involved in tracing him! Misdirection is totally within reach, while doing a perfect hiding job with technology is basically impossible. Be Kaiser Sosay. Be the NSA when they subverted all the ipsec standards for decades... by planting some guys on the IETF group whose mission was to subvert the standard by making it too complicated and incompatible with itself, that it would never got adopted. The entire internet would have been encrypted at the transport layer since ipsec1 if they hadn't pulled that one off!
All food for thought. Thanks for reading my rant
