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Fugitive on run for seventeen years found living in cave by a drone
- interestica 7y agoHe had a source of water and fuel. But what did he eat? The "household rubbish" suggests he had some sort of supply line?
- cameronbrown 7y agoIt's strange to imagine how much the world has changed in 17 years, from this guy's perspective.
- lsllc 7y agoThe concept of a drone and being discovered by one was probably quite a shock to him. I guess a re-do of "My Side of the Mountain" would be completely different in 2019!
- mcv 7y agoYeah, I bet he didn't expect to be found by drones. That's got to be the most immediate confrontation with how much the world has changed.
- mido22 7y agoThere is a recent chinese movie along the same theme "Ash is purest white". A person is jailed around 2002 and released about 10 years later and the whole world has changed.
- rusticpenn 7y agoI think Shawshank Redemption showed it pretty well.
- majos 7y agoIt’s 5 years, not 10. (But it’s 5 years in early-2000s China, so it might as well be 10.)
- thinkingemote 7y agoI beg to differ. For example Enemy of the State which dealt with aerial surveillance was released 21 years ago. Predator drones were deployed in the middle east in 2000 but were in use from 1995 in the Balkans. Quadcopters are new though. 17 years and people were living online lives. With Web 2.0 which began a couple of years later around 15 years ago. There's not much that has changed fundamentally which could cause a psychological shock. Now, if he was on the fun since 1980 maybe ... but 2002 was just around the corner (at least for the type of people who read HN).
- quaquaqua1 7y agoI'm sorry, drones were not in the public consciousness in 2002, let alone 2010, when the military was still mostly using helicopters for this type of search. Drones were used for bombing, and they are probably 10 times as large as consumer drones. There was no way he expected the police to have this technology and a desire to use it against him specifically. He also didn't read HN- he's barely able to communicate in his native language according to the article.
- cameronbrown 7y ago> Predator drones were deployed in the middle east in 2000 but were in use from 1995 in the Balkans. Quadcopters are new though. Quadcopters wouldn't have even been possible without serious advances in battery technology and radio infrastructure. There was no reason for him to expect the police would've had access to these kind of resources. > 17 years and people were living online lives. With Web 2.0 which began a couple of years later around 15 years ago. There's not much that has changed fundamentally which could cause a psychological shock. Even just the invention of the smartphone would be alien to him. I think you may have lost perspective on how different it is. People did not expect to be connected like we are today. It's obvious in hindsight but nobody could have predicted it.
- TheBeardKing 7y agoAnd how much longer before they use facial recognition to identify the fugitive then execute the arrest?
- wil421 7y agoExecute made me think of Judge Dredd. What the movies gets wron is it won’t be a person who is the Judge it will be an AI. Fugitive match found, sending drones to confirm, deploying Cop AI, running Judge routine, sentenced to death. I am the law.
- foxhop 7y agoWe call it, law-and-justice-as-a-service
- SiempreViernes 7y agoJustify(tm) Sadly, both justify.com and justify.it are squatted it appears.
- milankragujevic 7y agojustify.ai too.
- reportgunner 7y agojustif.ai
- dangerface 7y agoDunno why people are down voting you, china already does this. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2157883/drones-facial-recognition-and-social-credit-system-10-ways-china https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2157883/dron...
- CriticalCathed 7y ago
- narag 7y agoThey guy had managed to inflict himself punishment at no cost to taxpayers. At least victims will have some relief, otherwise it's a waste of time.
- sverige 7y agoIt's unclear from the article what his crime was, only that he escaped from a prison camp. It could be that his only crime was being Tibetan or Uighur or a member of Falun Gong or that he said something against the government. It's China, so the only 'victims' might be the prison guards on whose watch he escaped.
- wronghorse 7y agoThe second line of the article mentions that he was jailed for trafficking women and children.
- sweetheart 7y agoThe article immediately mentions he was originally imprisoned for human trafficking. It’s the first or second sentence.
- merlincorey 7y ago> It's unclear from the article what his crime was, only that he escaped from a prison camp. It is spelled out clearly in the article why: > The 63-year old, named Song Jiang by the police, had been jailed for trafficking women and children but escaped from a prison camp in 2002.
- azinman2 7y agoIt says so literally in the first paragraph: “The 63-year old, named Song Jiang by the police, had been jailed for trafficking women and children but escaped from a prison camp in 2002.“
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- efa 7y agoLiving in a cave not able to leave maybe slightly better than a jail cell? Of course I'm not sure what other horrors he faced in a Chinese prison.
- dangerface 7y agoThe article says he escaped from prison camp which I assume is a work camp.
- solatic 7y agoWhat defines a prison is not the lock on the door, but who controls the key.
- SamuelAdams 7y agoPersonally I would rather live in a cave. When you're in a jail cell, you might end up on an operating table because some wealthy someone needs a new liver, and yours was a match. This person did live in exile, but he lived nonetheless. To some life itself is more important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
- reaperducer 7y agoThere are hundreds of thousands of people who live in caves. China and Turkey leap to mind. The article I read about it in Turkey showed it as a kind of cultural heritage thing, not a poverty thing. The article I read about it in China was about the Chinese government forcing people who live in caves to move to cities, where they have no social nets or coping skills. Apparently there is some huge number (hundreds of thousands? millions? I forget) of people in China who live in caves in the western part of the country, and Beijing considers their lifestyle an embarrassment.
- foxhop 7y agoWait he sufficiently exiled himself and rejoined nature, survived (likely alone) for 17 years, and they take him back to prison?
- numlock86 7y agoWhile I sort of get your point: What would be your ideal alternative? Just let him keep going on?
- zdkl 7y agoProvided the conditions outlined in GP are met, why not?
- dTal 7y agoWhat's the point of imprisoning someone? Punishment? This clearly was less harsh, or he would not prefer it. Protecting society? He roams free. A deterrent? Leaving him there would send the message to others that escaping and evading capture is a viable route to freedom.
- owenmarshall 7y agoIdeally it'd be rehabilitating the offender, so they can rejoin society and be less likely to offend in the future. This could mean mental health evaluation and treatment, addiction counseling, education and job training to help them learn a skill, and restorative justice. I'd say none of these things happened in a cave.
- beatgammit 7y ago17 years is a long time to think about what you've done, so it's very possible that he is no longer a threat to society. And if there's no evidence that he has committed crimes while living in the cave, how likely is he to commit crimes going forward? I think it should be brought in, evaluated, and released if he no longer poses a threat.
- leon1717 7y agoMight be a good twist: it's a state sponsored DJI ads, PRC gently saves the drone industry.
- breitling 7y agoThere was a similar case in the US. In the 70's, there was a crooked cop who was convicted (for some lewd acts) and had to surrender himself to prison. He chose to run instead and spent 22 years in the forest. Eventually he couldn't take it anymore and surrendered himself. He was then given a suspended sentence citing that he already has been through enough. Here's a podcast episode on that: https://snapjudgment.org/cop-out https://snapjudgment.org/cop-out
- NullPrefix 7y ago> He was then given a suspended sentence citing that he already has been through enough. Kind of similar to Assange, no?
- mrlala 7y ago>no? No.
- NullPrefix 7y agoAre you saying that he needs to go through more?
- ajna91 7y agoInteresting story, an interview with him here. https://www.npr.org/2015/05/08/405191537/cop-out https://www.npr.org/2015/05/08/405191537/cop-out
- cheez 7y agoHmm... I could take this tradeoff.
- cr0sh 7y agoThough nobody really knows what happened to him, and I think he's still on the FBI's most wanted list - here in Arizona we have the case of Robert Fisher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_William_Fisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_William_Fisher Yep - he's still on the wanted list - going on 18-19 years now. It's unclear whether he's dead, hiding out, or what; all signs point to him at least escaping and "going into the wilderness". What's happened since that point is anyone's guess. For that matter, though, the whole escapade has a lot of questions if you research it. The official story is that one day, he snapped, and decided to kill his wife and kids, then blow up their house (natural gas explosion - leveled it) - supposedly to try to hid the evidence of the murder. Then he took the dog with him in their SUV, ran off into the wilderness - then vanished. The dog and the SUV were found, and that was it. There were questions (at the time) - theory, conspiracy, you name it - but I don't know what to make of them; it was all one weird thing in what would turn out to be a tumultuous year, and quickly overtaken by events and somewhat "forgotten". The questions still remain as to why and what really happened - the official case states marital trouble, but none of it seems (but who knows what his mental state was) to rise to the level of what occurred, though the background seems a convenient explanation after the fact.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoI've watched "Alone" on the History Channel from time to time. One of the things that surprised me was how the contestants were affected mentally. Often enough they tap out not from lack of food, but from lack of human contact. It's amazing this guy survived. It's close to a miracle he did it alone.
- MisterTea 7y ago> Yongshan police received clues about Song's whereabouts in early September, they said on their WeChat account. So there is no tech or surveillance story here. Only the use of a relatively common high tech gadget aiding good old fashioned police work.
- generous 7y agoAccording to the police, the man had been living in seclusion for so long that it was difficult for him to communicate with the officers. Even so, he was caught because of someone who clues about Song's whereabouts to the police. He must have been communicating with someone all this time. 17 years is such a looooong time!
- Someone 7y agoReminds me of the famous examples of Japanese soldiers fighting on after 1945, two of them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teruo_Nakamura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teruo_Nakamura, on separate islands) until 1974. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout even mentions “Shigeyuki Hashimoto and Kiyoaki Tanaka joined the Malayan Communist Party's guerrilla forces to continue fighting, returning to Japan in January 1990”)
- billpg 7y agoJulian Assange?
- gxs 7y agoI wonder if he'd had means, not a lot just a few thousand dollars, he would have been able to remain free. Maybe moving completely out of the area, buying a used car cash and driving to another state entirely? Somehow getting himself into Mexico and boarding a ship somewhere in south america or asia? I wonder if these days with all the surveillance it really takes living in a cave to get away from law enforcement.
- tyingq 7y agoEstablishing a new identity wasn't a huge task when we were paper based. A pretty common approach was finding someone that died young, roughly your age, in a rural or religious community that probably didn't file the right papers to document the death. Or somewhere small enough that destroying the single paper in a file accomplished the same. Then bootstrap that up from a birth certificate to a social security card and so on. I imagine it's not that simple anymore.
- maerF0x0 7y agoHis crime is sufficiently distateful that I dont want to defend him specifically. But the overall subject raises interesting questions about enforcement of laws and their applicability as enforcement approaches perfect. (ie 100%) For example consider speeding laws we can actually approach perfect enforcement using GPS data and engine management. But then the question becomes how does the archaic law morph when perfectly applied? Should _every_ driver who _ever_ speeds be charged the fine? That is roughly every driver every time they drive whom uses the highways near me. And how often should they be charged? Each time they exceed the speed limit (for example if speedlimit is 65 and I brake to 64, then speed to 66 several times, is that several tickets?) ... I suspect that most of our laws have been written without grace/forgiveness knowing that we used to only catch a small percentage of perpetrators, and likely the most egregious of them (assuming frequency & magnitude would increase probability of being caught). What ought do if that percent sky rockets, but the laws were designed for the former value?
- oxplot 7y agoWorth thinking about when this law came into effect and limitations of technology at that time. Given GPS data, it's possible to ensure the car never exceeds the speed limit and hence, perfect enforcement of the law may result in no more fines (or even less) as it does now. There is of course safety implications of forcing cars under a speed limit which the law would be taking into effect, which is yet another twist making the perfect enforcement unlikely.
- naasking 7y ago> I suspect that most of our laws have been written without grace/forgiveness knowing that we used to only catch a small percentage of perpetrators Or that we can choose not to prosecute in order to use their testimony against a bigger fish. It's called prosecutorial discretion, and it seems reasonable at first, but it's responsible for the slow encroachment of government in all aspects of private life. After all, why change or protest a law you break every day if it will never be used against you? Everyone probably breaks multiple laws a day without realising it. If everyone that broke any law had to be charged and prosecuted, we would have a much more politically engaged populace, a much more efficient process to appeal judgements and repeal unjust laws.
- NTDF9 7y agoWhat an amazing script for a movie