Bribes are unlikely to succeed and will probably get you arrested. Even if they do work the person you bribed knows about your new ID. If they get arrested you'll also be caught.

That leaves stealing someone else's ID. It's not that hard but can be time consuming and of course it's illegal with a mandatory minimum federal sentence in the US. You'll need to know how to forge various documents, among other skills I won't go into. Most documents are easy to forge including many state IDs. If you don't need to travel out of the country it's totally doable. Getting a passport is much harder since you'll need to get the real thing. There are ways to do it but you'd have to be pretty serious and the risks are fairly high.

Hilarious. Former victim of ID theft here.

It used to be very easy to get copies of birth certificates and things (with almost no proof you're the person it's for), but at least in the UK, they tightened this up in around 2004.

It would be interesting to see. But even if all of the old loopholes have been patched up, I'd wager that new ones have emerged at the same time. It's just a question of finding them.

If here were willing to wait 5 years to see if the Obama administration would make things better, he probably could have afforded to wait another few years. (Though one mitigating factor is the time limit after obtaining the documents and getting found out)

Here's the math. $150,000 average - $44,000 for income taxes. Subtract another minimum of $3k to $4k per month for living expenses, given he was in Hawaii.

Snowden likely couldn't have saved more than $35k to $50k per year.

It would have taken him a decade or more to save the kind of funds required to both buy citizenship and live on it.

Cost of living in Dominica (2) is between 40-60% cheaper than in Honolulu. Working as a telecommuting freelancer I think he would be fine.

1: http://www.isla-offshore.com/services/citizenship-dominica/

2: http://www.numbeo.com/

That said, yeah, probably not enough to retire on.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/28/business/world-overlooked-...

I'm sure there are other places that are a lot cheaper.

1: http://www.isla-offshore.com/services/citizenship-dominica/

Of course, this all requires some foresight, as you'd have to have ID documents done with the "disguised" appearance... but that's half my point - now is the time to start working on getting alternate identities, if you think there's even a slight chance you might need it.

all of that doesn't concern snowden since he's on the run with a celeb status.

I wouldn't call that easy.

> a country allowing entrance with non-biometric passports

haven't heard of it tbh. a passport has to be valid. since Polish passports have 10 year validity, you can travel today with an old passport from late 2003. now I checked Canada demands a visa from Poles who have an old passport, not sure about, uhm, the vast whole rest of the world.

forging docs is 'the easy part', not 'easy' per se. what's challenging is crossing borders if you're on the run - you need some expertise about their security habits and diplomatic relations. if you got into criminal shit and Interpol is after you, you're screwed anyway, if they can track down top level mobsters hiding in a foreign village, they will track down an amateur.

He did his actions with the view that being public and making this public was more important than the dire consequences that were very plausible.

And naturally, creating a false identity is much harder for someone who's had access to this information. They track people like that - constantly - it's not even the same as ordinary surveillance since anyone entering this world agrees to it.

Yeah, no one would ever be able to walk out with hard drive(s) full of data and then fly to hong kong and russia and leak it with that much nsa surveillance. Oops.