Comment by rcarr
3 years ago
This is somewhat similar to how they ended up catching the Unabomber. The FBI were literally at a dead end. They ended up posting one of his letters/manifestos in the paper, somebody recognised a turn of phrase the unabomber used that was unusual and reported it as possibly being their brother, FBI investigated the lead and it lead them straight to him.
Excerpts from wiki:
> Before the publication of Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski's brother, David, was encouraged by his wife to follow up on suspicions that Ted was the Unabomber.[91] David was dismissive at first, but he took the likelihood more seriously after reading the manifesto a week after it was published in September 1995. He searched through old family papers and found letters dating to the 1970s that Ted had sent to newspapers to protest the abuses of technology using phrasing similar to that in the manifesto.[92]
> In early 1996, an investigator working with Bisceglie contacted former FBI hostage negotiator and criminal profiler Clinton R. Van Zandt. Bisceglie asked him to compare the manifesto to typewritten copies of handwritten letters David had received from his brother. Van Zandt's initial analysis determined that there was better than a 60 percent chance that the same person had written the manifesto, which had been in public circulation for half a year. Van Zandt's second analytical team determined a higher likelihood. He recommended Bisceglie's client contact the FBI immediately.[96]
> In February 1996, Bisceglie gave a copy of the 1971 essay written by Ted Kaczynski to Molly Flynn at the FBI.[87] She forwarded the essay to the San Francisco-based task force. FBI profiler James R. Fitzgerald[98][99] recognized similarities in the writings using linguistic analysis and determined that the author of the essays and the manifesto was almost certainly the same person. Combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski's life, the analysis provided the basis for an affidavit signed by Terry Turchie, the head of the entire investigation, in support of the application for a search warrant.[87]
As I recall, one of the clinchers was his use of the phrase, "you can’t eat your cake and have it too" as opposed to the now-predominant variant "you can’t have your cake and eat it too."
I often wonder if stylometry can be used to positively identify a person based not on general word frequency, but by a single phrase or two which are rare in general but commonly used by the individual. In theory this could be relatively easy to find given a large corpus. You'd pick out the top few n-grams for short phrases by an individual and identify the ones which are most overly-represented compared to the rest of the population.
It was actually his brother.
So is the lesson you should have GPT rewrite your manifesto so as to obscure your personal idioms?
Or something purpose-built like Anonymouth (https://github.com/psal/anonymouth), although it seems to be both unique and dead.
Also interesting:
> Ross Ulbricht aka Dread Pirate Roberts, the mastermind behind the infamous Silk Road site which served as a black market for drugs, weapons and fake documents was also well aware of the potential danger of stylometry being used against him. At the time of his arrest in a San Francisco public library, the FBI captured images of his laptop screen as evidence. Guess what what he had bookmarked — “Science of Stylometry.”
https://medium.com/svilenk/the-case-for-anonymity-12db114f0c...
I mean he used an forum account with an email that had his name in it.
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Only if you have a history of sending crazed writings/manifestos to newspapers and family.
The show “Manhunt: Unabomber” (Netflix) shows this whole story very well.