Comment by MichaelGG
10 years ago
I find it hard to drive home how much info people leak. Just the cultural references you make, cross referenced with Kindle purchase history...
But as touched on, the real question is how well does disinformation work against LE? We see all sorts of dumb reveals in court documents. A single line like "yeah I spent 30 days in jail for pot last summer" really narrows it down. But how far will it throw LE off if such a slip is false? Are they actively trying to determine this kinda thing? Without knowing how many investigations simply fail, I suppose it's hard to know.
I guess the best indicators are the long-standing evasions we know of, such as the FBI agents that the KGB turned.
The other take-home lesson is to use high-latency communication. In the lulzsec investigations, agents monitored when Tor was on in the suspect's apartment, correlated to when the handle was chatting. (OK he was probably toast at that point anyways.) I'd also guess that doing batch communication reduces the tendency to slip up. No small talk. Also no external interruptions ("sorry, power just went out for a minute") to mention.
A mention isn't even necessary. Imagine being Light getting his source of information from the internet, his ISP has a small incident with a lightning storm and they lose connectivity completely for a few days while things get sorted out. Involuntarily information has just been leaked irregardless of all other protections, the deaths of criminals would have been disrupted. In this situation you would ideally be working to some great latency of days or weak to give a buffer of information. It's talked about in the first few episodes that he works ahead in case of sickness, but it's not mentioned after that, possibly because it means he can't use those events as cover for on the spot murders (which would stand out from week old information based murders).
Maybe it would have made sense to only use week-old information to begin with.
Probably would have been a better idea. Only later in the Anime does he actually need to do things quickly, all the rest really could have waited weeks or even months. That said it wouldn't have made for very interesting watching if he managed to have that much forward thinking all the time.
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