Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)

[Ray Dillinger]

(Re: CDR RE: snipped from headers.....)

On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Sunder wrote:

>Ray Dillinger wrote:
>> 
>> On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>> 
>> And your possible motive for spreading the word about his reputation,
>> which ties you to an illicit transaction, is what exactly?
>
>Wouldn't your own reputation be blinded by a nym anyway?

Give me a few dozen writing samples from each of a hundred known 
people, and another writing sample a hundred words long from one 
of them under a pseudonym, and I can tell you to a 90% probability 
which of the hundred known people wrote it. 

If some persistent pseudonym has a record with hundreds or thousands 
of illicit transactions, the lions are going to be crawling cyberspace 
for *any* writing that matches its style closely enough to have been 
written by the same person.  They'll get a short list.  Then they'll 
start eliminating possibilities and when they're down to three or four 
they'll start getting wiretap orders.

With the wiretap order, they can run a sting or a man-in-the-middle 
attack so they've got one solid charge.  That will net them an arrest 
warrant if it works.  But whether this works or not, they can still 
get a search warrant after they give it a shot. 

If the machine is not theft-secure (and face it, almost no machines 
are), the arrest warrant issues anyway and the owner of the pseudonym 
winds up in jail.  And the lions didn't have to do any particularly 
clever cryptanalysis to get there.  All they had to do was run a 
spreadsheet counting grammar, word choice, sentence length, and a few
other parameters until they found a match.


				Bear