4 ms·

In the book The Day of the Jackal, this is covered well. The assassin goes to a cemetery, looks for gravestones of infants who would have been the same age as h

In the book The Day of the Jackal, this is covered well. The assassin goes to a cemetery, looks for gravestones of infants who would have been the same age as him and finagles that child’s birth certificate using info from a local vicar. With that, he’s able to get all the other documents, including a passport. And then he’s off to assassinate people.

WalterBright 8y ago
I'd be careful about using a movie as a how-to guide for anything other than making a movie. They routinely make up any sort of nonsense needed to make the plot move forward. This is quite obvious when the topic is something I know more about than a lay person. For example, in the Revenant, the hero goes swimming for extended periods in an ice-filled river. TDotJ was a good movie, though :-)
- philwelch 8y ago
  There’s also a sense of ethics involved in portraying criminal hijinks, because you don’t always want to advertise how to commit difficult crimes. For example, most of the meth production techniques in Breaking Bad were utterly fictitious.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  I’ve never seen the movie but I read the book a long time ago. The description in TDOTJ of how to get a legitimate passport with false information is almost exactly the same as what the the police spies did for infiltrating political activist groups in the UK. I wouldn’t try it in the UK now though. Death and birth cert records are now collated at a national level. That’s not true in the US so it’s still possible. The record keeping procedures vary by state. Some states do it centrally, some are stored at the county level. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
  - VLM 8y ago
    Social Security Death Index is nationwide in the US and seemingly instantaneous, certainly no more than a day or two to update. Although half your argument is invalid, the other half remains perfectly valid, along with the overall conclusions, etc. SSDI is pretty useful for recent (dead in the last century or so) genealogical research.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    How about someone who died abroad, how would that get recorded in the UK, say you die in Papua New Guinea (not a particularly strong civic administration system AFAIK)? ...
- Nursie 8y ago
  This has been shown to have worked, historically, and I believe in relatively recent times someone was able to request some documents in the name of Frederick Forsyth (the original author) using similar techniques. It's surprisingly easy to get a Birth Certificate, for instance, which is used for ID purposes and can be the route to (legitimate) passports etc. You need some relatively obscure information about the birth, but this can often be found in digitised records through places like ancestry.co.uk I have no experience of doing this illictly, but in order to get proper identification documents for my girlfriend, it only took a bit of digging, and a free trial account at ancestry.co.uk (which I then cancelled) and the appropriate fee to the General Register Office. It certainly felt at the time like that could easily be abused.
  - VLM 8y ago
    A classic example of identifying the threat model when designing a security system. There's no point in making a very expensive and complicated system to deny ID cards to international "Day of the Jackal" level of murdering terrorists because if you make the documentation process more complicated than simply killing someone who looks like the terrorist and taking their wallet... Meanwhile the actual threat model for identity theft is a dude setting up an assembly line of dozens or hundreds of fake IDs to get loans from banks that are never repaid. The registry is somewhat lax, the registry of registry users is somewhat better run. I can request my birth certificate be mailed to me and as long as nothing interesting happens, nobody cares... but if a couple bad loans were documented by BCs mailed to me at my house... this is why the BC request process seems a heck of a lot more interested in legally identifying who is getting the certificates than it is in how much I "deserve" to get the certificates.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Just to open a bank account, with no credit line, I had to provide my entire residence history including flats [ie apartments, ~condos] I'd stayed in decades ago. I was already a customer with that bank for the decades since I'd lived temporarily in those flats. Census data indicates abode and no doubt one can buy a listing of addressees at a residence over a particular period from the post-office. Not sure how you can fake that except to be an immigrant, then you need papers for that. I guess you have to choose your mark.
- bookofjoe 8y ago
  >They routinely make up any sort of nonsense needed to make the plot move forward. This is quite obvious when the topic is something I know more about than a lay person. For example, in the Revenant, the hero goes swimming for extended periods in an ice-filled river. Lewis Pugh might demur: https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/lewis-pugh-north-pole-icy-swim https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/lewis-pugh-north-pole-icy-swim
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    In the cited article, he's carefully taken care of by others when coming out of the water. Otherwise, he'd be dead. You don't just climb out and you're fine, like our hero. Besides, the article calls the stunt death-defying for a reason. If you fall off a boat in the arctic, you're dead before they can reach you.

WalterBright 8y ago

I'd be careful about using a movie as a how-to guide for anything other than making a movie. They routinely make up any sort of nonsense needed to make the plot move forward. This is quite obvious when the topic is something I know more about than a lay person. For example, in the Revenant, the hero goes swimming for extended periods in an ice-filled river. TDotJ was a good movie, though :-)

philwelch 8y ago
There’s also a sense of ethics involved in portraying criminal hijinks, because you don’t always want to advertise how to commit difficult crimes. For example, most of the meth production techniques in Breaking Bad were utterly fictitious.
barry-cotter 8y ago
I’ve never seen the movie but I read the book a long time ago. The description in TDOTJ of how to get a legitimate passport with false information is almost exactly the same as what the the police spies did for infiltrating political activist groups in the UK. I wouldn’t try it in the UK now though. Death and birth cert records are now collated at a national level. That’s not true in the US so it’s still possible. The record keeping procedures vary by state. Some states do it centrally, some are stored at the county level. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
- VLM 8y ago
  Social Security Death Index is nationwide in the US and seemingly instantaneous, certainly no more than a day or two to update. Although half your argument is invalid, the other half remains perfectly valid, along with the overall conclusions, etc. SSDI is pretty useful for recent (dead in the last century or so) genealogical research.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  How about someone who died abroad, how would that get recorded in the UK, say you die in Papua New Guinea (not a particularly strong civic administration system AFAIK)? ...
Nursie 8y ago
This has been shown to have worked, historically, and I believe in relatively recent times someone was able to request some documents in the name of Frederick Forsyth (the original author) using similar techniques. It's surprisingly easy to get a Birth Certificate, for instance, which is used for ID purposes and can be the route to (legitimate) passports etc. You need some relatively obscure information about the birth, but this can often be found in digitised records through places like ancestry.co.uk I have no experience of doing this illictly, but in order to get proper identification documents for my girlfriend, it only took a bit of digging, and a free trial account at ancestry.co.uk (which I then cancelled) and the appropriate fee to the General Register Office. It certainly felt at the time like that could easily be abused.
- VLM 8y ago
  A classic example of identifying the threat model when designing a security system. There's no point in making a very expensive and complicated system to deny ID cards to international "Day of the Jackal" level of murdering terrorists because if you make the documentation process more complicated than simply killing someone who looks like the terrorist and taking their wallet... Meanwhile the actual threat model for identity theft is a dude setting up an assembly line of dozens or hundreds of fake IDs to get loans from banks that are never repaid. The registry is somewhat lax, the registry of registry users is somewhat better run. I can request my birth certificate be mailed to me and as long as nothing interesting happens, nobody cares... but if a couple bad loans were documented by BCs mailed to me at my house... this is why the BC request process seems a heck of a lot more interested in legally identifying who is getting the certificates than it is in how much I "deserve" to get the certificates.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Just to open a bank account, with no credit line, I had to provide my entire residence history including flats [ie apartments, ~condos] I'd stayed in decades ago. I was already a customer with that bank for the decades since I'd lived temporarily in those flats. Census data indicates abode and no doubt one can buy a listing of addressees at a residence over a particular period from the post-office. Not sure how you can fake that except to be an immigrant, then you need papers for that. I guess you have to choose your mark.
bookofjoe 8y ago
>They routinely make up any sort of nonsense needed to make the plot move forward. This is quite obvious when the topic is something I know more about than a lay person. For example, in the Revenant, the hero goes swimming for extended periods in an ice-filled river. Lewis Pugh might demur: https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/lewis-pugh-north-pole-icy-swim https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/lewis-pugh-north-pole-icy-swim
- WalterBright 8y ago
  In the cited article, he's carefully taken care of by others when coming out of the water. Otherwise, he'd be dead. You don't just climb out and you're fine, like our hero. Besides, the article calls the stunt death-defying for a reason. If you fall off a boat in the arctic, you're dead before they can reach you.