How to disappear

You could easily mistake Alec Harris for a spy or an escaped prisoner, given all of the tradecraft he devotes to being unfindable. Mail addressed to him goes to a UPS Store. To buy things online, he uses a YubiKey, a small piece of hardware resembling a thumb drive, to open Bitwarden, a password manager that stores his hundreds of unique, long, random passwords. Then he logs in to Privacy.com, a subscription service that lets him open virtual debit cards under as many different names as he wishes; Harris has 191 cards at this point, each specific to a single vendor but all linked to the same bank account. This isolates risk: If any vendor is breached, whatever information it has about him won’t be exploitable anywhere else.

Harris has likewise strictly limited access to his work and personal phone numbers by associating his main phone with up to 10 different numbers. He has burner numbers and project-specific numbers, a local-area-code number to give out to workers coming to his house, a dedicated number for two-factor authentication, and a number from a city where he previously lived that he doesn’t use much anymore but is helpful for ambiguating his identity in databases. He has additional numbers that, through a fancy hardware modification, even his mobile carriers can’t associate with the device. He can also open multiple browser sessions on the phone, each showing a different IP address, which limits tracking and prevents websites from aggregating information about him.

In a safe at home, Harris keeps prepaid anonymous debit and gift cards (Google Play, Apple Gift), prepaid SIM cards, phones for use in Europe, a Faraday bag (to shield wireless devices from hacks and location tracking), a burner laptop, and family passports. He also carries a passport card, a wallet-size government-issued ID that, unlike a driver’s license, doesn’t show his address. When using Uber, he provides an intersection near his house as his pickup or drop-off point. For food deliveries, he might give a random neighbor’s address and, after the order is accepted, message the driver, “Oops, I typed out the address wrong. Let me know when you’re here, and I’ll run out.”

Harris is the CEO of HavenX, a firm that provides its clients with extreme privacy and security services. It was spun off from Halo, which focuses on government clients, in 2023. HavenX customers, some of whom pay tens of thousands of dollars a month, typically face serious threats. Some are celebrities or ultra-wealthy families. Others are business executives—interest from this group has risen since the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year. The recent Signal leak, too, in which the editor in chief of this magazine was erroneously added to a high-level Trump administration group chat, triggered more than a few corner-office freak-outs. Many HavenX clients come from the cryptocurrency world: Some made a fast fortune and, because they can’t park their crypto in a bank, are unusually vulnerable; some run crypto companies and are seen, accurately or not, as controlling access to other people’s digital wealth. The recent crypto-market boom has brought a wave of kidnappings, in which some crypto owners have even been held for ransom or tortured into surrendering the keys to their coins. Harris said the first quarter of this year was HavenX’s busiest since the spin-off.

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Lots of companies, including giants like Kroll, are in the security business, but HavenX has positioned itself as a boutique solver of exotic problems. During one of our conversations, Harris mentioned a recent case where the chief information-security officer at a large company with its own intelligence team called him. An executive at the company was being extorted, and the company’s investigators had managed to link the extortionist to an X account, a Telegram number, and an African phone number, but they hadn’t been able to learn their real-world identity. “That’s where their capability stops,” Harris said. “It’s where we say, ‘That’s interesting,’ and we start.”