Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: Railgun on August 13, 2013, 10:49 pm
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I heard a lot about stylometry, yet, luckily, it seems like most SR users here type pretty similarly. Quite contrary to the "druggie" persona, people here seem pretty adept at syntax.
How much do you alter your writing style? Do you think it's important?
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I'd say it's very important, and the more serious your crime, the more important it becomes.
It's one thing to *casually* identify someone based on their writing style, like a forum mod that has a knack for finding ban evaders. It's another thing entirely to do so empirically and in a way that is admissible in court, or at least for a search warrant application etc.
Some are better than others at switching writing styles. There are people that can maintain 200 online personas with distinct, individual syntax, while others are so obvious that almost anyone can pick out their posts across multiple accounts. For the sake of SR, let's just say that some vendors with multiple accounts (on SR itself as well as the forums) and of course our resident troll or two aren't very good at it. Luckily for them, it's unlikely that this kind of attack would be used against them unless they are major vendors of hard drugs. I wouldn't risk my safety on that assumption though.
Even if LE can't directly use your writing against you in court or to secure a warrant, it will always help experienced operatives narrow down their investigation, kind of like a polygraph test. Don't make their job any easier! There's got to be a tutorial on changing one's writing style somewhere, and if not, there ought to be. Perhaps I'll read up on forensic stylometry and work backwards from there.
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Many people here write similarly, but a lot of people have unique quirks in their writing style which make it easy for non-experts (like us) to link them to other pseudonymous identities, like other forum accounts they've used. I've seen it happen on a few occasions, like with mtljohn and chaosforpeace. Experts using statistical analyses should fair much better than us. The only thing is, in order to learn your real identity, they would have to link your writing to things you wrote under your real identity. I hope no high profile members of this community ever kept a blog on a server that still has their IP address. Don't write long-winded posts on reddit over clearnet, either.
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The way i see it is, why not change up your writing style?
It could only add a layer of security to you and i see no obvious cons to changing the way you write.
and as for the 'druggies' on here, i am willing to bet that because most people here were smart enough to teach themselves about TOR, BTC, SR, PGP etc they are educated enough to the point where they wont come off as obvious druggies.
tl;dr most users here are smarter than the average druggie IMO
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I'd say it's very important, and the more serious your crime, the more important it becomes.
It's one thing to *casually* identify someone based on their writing style, like a forum mod that has a knack for finding ban evaders. It's another thing entirely to do so empirically and in a way that is admissible in court, or at least for a search warrant application etc.
Some are better than others at switching writing styles. There are people that can maintain 200 online personas with distinct, individual syntax, while others are so obvious that almost anyone can pick out their posts across multiple accounts. For the sake of SR, let's just say that some vendors with multiple accounts (on SR itself as well as the forums) and of course our resident troll or two aren't very good at it. Luckily for them, it's unlikely that this kind of attack would be used against them unless they are major vendors of hard drugs. I wouldn't risk my safety on that assumption though.
Even if LE can't directly use your writing against you in court or to secure a warrant, it will always help experienced operatives narrow down their investigation, kind of like a polygraph test. Don't make their job any easier! There's got to be a tutorial on changing one's writing style somewhere, and if not, there ought to be. Perhaps I'll read up on forensic stylometry and work backwards from there.
I think some basics are:
-clause placement
-frequent use of the same adjectives/adverbs, especially if they are a bit nebulous.
-Deviations from the norm
The last is the biggest one. I think that's the part that people have to watch out for the most. For example, this is correct. For example: this is also correct. I think switching up in that fashion would aid a great deal.
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^^I'd say that's a good place to start. Change up the style without trying too hard.
If they're using statistical analysis software to tie your SR writing style to your clearnet accounts like astor suggested, it should be quite easy to mess with your 'writing profile' if you know the parameters it measures.
The more writing samples they load into their database, the harder it will be to throw the program off. Anyone moving serious weight on SR should be brief and to the point while trying to blend in with the writing styles of other vendors.
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It's really easy to detect aliases if you actually put some time into analyzing the suspect writing styles. There are now tools out that can help tie writing styles to a user. Check these out:
CLEARNET:
https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/Main_Page
Here are some tips on how to prevent your style from becoming recognizable or unique in any way:
Switching up capitalization. For example, if you normally capitalize your
Switching up grammar. For example, if you normally use a lot of commas, don't use many on SR forums.
Don't use slang. That's a huge giveaway, just stick to words in the dictionary, and it will make it that much harder for law enforcement.
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Last I checked, my computer didn't ask for my comments to be written in handwriting.
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The way i see it is, why not change up your writing style?
It could only add a layer of security to you and i see no obvious cons to changing the way you write.
It's not so easy to do. You can naturally do it in a way as to fool many people, but experts it is much more difficult. Sadly the way you write and express yourself, no matter what, is sort of "encoded". Even if you change your grammatical style you cannot change your propensities to express yourself in a determined way. The topic of writing is a very subtle one.
Still it can naturally depend if something like that is enough to obtain a warrant and I don't know it. Even more it will cost a lot of money to have a group of experts to do it, so I highly doubt that as a buyer you have something to worry about on this point.
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These programs may be relevant to your interests:
Welcome to the home page of Signature, a program designed to facilitate "stylometric" analysis and comparison of texts, with a particular emphasis on author identification.
http://www.philocomp.net/humanities/signature
JGAAP (Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program) is a Java-based, modular, program for textual analysis, text categorization, and authorship attribution i.e. stylometry / textometry.
http://evllabs.com/jgaap/w/index.php/Main_Page
It's probably similar to what secret services use.
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I'm skeptical. Unless someone here is John Grisham or Tom Clancy, I can't see the feds figuring out who we are based on sentence structure and grammar. I'm sure it's possible with a large enough sample, but it just seems unlikely. I can't picture myself cooperating with LE based on their suggestion that they wanted to talk to me about my internet habits.