Who wrote that?

Who wrote that>

Original text in German
Wer schreibt denn da?

Ziindlumpen #76

2020

‘zuendlappen noblogs org/post/2020/10/07/xwer-scheibi-denn-da.

Teanslation and layout
NoTrace Project

notrace how/resources/#fwho-wrote
Contents

Introduction .. e

Author Identification at the BKA ..... 4

Methods of author recognition and author profiling 7
.9

And now what? ..

Introduction

Abrief overview of modern forensic inguistics methods
for determining authorship.

The following article trics to give an overview
from a non-technical perspective and to make a
corresponding evaluation. There are some academic
publications on this topic that could be evaluated
for abetter assessment. However, my main purpose
here s just to aise the issuc, not to provide a sound
and conclusive view so if you know anything morc,
publish it!

Avoiding traces that could be your undoing dovn
the road—perhaps even after years or decades—is
probably of interest to most people who occasion-
ally commita crime and come into conflict with the
law. Avoiding fingerprints, avoiding DNA traces,
avoiding shoe prints and textile fiber traces or at
least disposing of clothing afterwards, avoiding
surveillance cameras, avoiding tool traces, avoiding
recordings of any kind, recognizing surveillance,
ete.—all this should be a concern for anyone who
commits crimes from time to time and wants to
protect themselves from identification. But what
about those traces that often arisc only after a crime
has been committed, out of the urge to cxplain
onc's deed anonymously or even by using a recur-
ring pscudonym? When writing and publishing a
communiqué?

My impression is that in many cases no special
attention s paid to these traces despite rapid
technological development of analytical capacitis.
‘This may be intentional, negligent, or a compromise
of competing needs. Without wishing to make
a general suggestion here on how to deal with
these traces—after all, everyone must determine
that for themselves—I would like to outline the
methods the investigative authorities in Germany
and elsewhere are currently (probably) working
with, what scems possible in theory,and what could
become possible in the future.

Perhaps I should note in advance that cverything or
atleast mostofwhat I present here i scientifically as
well s legally controversial. L am also less intercsted
in the legal validity of linguistic analyses—and
not in the scientific one cither—than in whether

it scems plausible that these investigations could
guide a surveillance effort, because even if a trail
i not useful in court by itself, it could stilllead to

other, useful trails.

Author Identification at the BKA

According to its own information, the Federal
Criminal Police Office (BKA) maintains a depart-
ment dedicated to identifying the authors of texts.
‘The focus is on texts related to criminal acts,
such as responsibility claims, but also “position
papers” from the “left-wing extremist spectrum,”
among others. Al collected texts are processed
by linguistic studics in a so-called collection of
communiques and can be comparcd and scarched
with the Criminal Information System for Texts

(KISTE). According to the BKA, the texts are
classified according to the following biographical
characteristcs of their (alleged) authors: origin, age,
education and occupation.

Al incoming texts are also compared with previ-
ously saved texts to determine whether several texts
may have been written by the same author.

In the context of case-specific investigations, the
stored texts can also be compared with texts whose
authorship is known in order to determine whether
they were written by the same author or whether
this can be ruled out.

“This s the official information from the BKA about
this department, What docs this mean in practice?

I think that one can assume that at least all respon-
sibility claims are recorded in this database and
analyzed to see whether there ae other responsi-
bility claims by the same author(s). The finding
that they also record “position papers” allows us to
draw further conclusions: at the very least, it seems
possible that in addition to texts with criminal
relevance, they also store other texts that are thought
to come from a particular scene. For example,texts
from newspapers,statements from political groups/
organizations, calls, blog posts, etc. In the worst
case, I would assume that all published texts on
known “left-wing extremist” websites (after all it
s quite easy to get hold of them), as well as texts
from print publications that appear interesting to
the investigating authorities, would be fed into this
database.
“This would mean that for each responsibilty claim,
the BKA would have a cluster of texts that they
presume to have the same author. These can consist
of other claims as well as texts that have been fed
into the database. In addition to serics of crimes,
further clues to perpetrators can be obtained, such
as pseudonyms, group names—or,in the worst casc,
‘names—under which an author of claim may have
written other texts, but also, depending on the text,
all kinds of otherinformation thatit provides, often
including clues to a person's place of residence and
activity thematic focus, biographical characteristics,
educational background, ete. All of this information
can at the very least be used to nasrow down the
circle of suspects.

‘What remains unclear in all of this is what other
comparison samples the BKA might obtain. For
‘most people, there is certainly a whole serics of
texts to which investigating authoritics (could) have
access and which could be fed into the database
in the event of suspicion or possibly also partly as
a precaution—if a person is on file with an entry
such as *violent left-wing extremist”,cte. This could
be anything with your name under i, from a leter
to an authority to a letter to the cditor in the
newspaper. 1 will intentionally name only the most
obvious sources here, so as not to inadvertently
provide the investigating authoritics with decisive
inspiration, but I'm sure you can answer for yoursclf
which texts of yours might be accessible. If the
profilers of the BKA succeed in narrowing down the
circle of suspects to a specific characteristic, which
allows the comparison with masses of available
text samples (for example, if it is assumed that a
scientist of a certain discipline is responsibl
letter, all publications in this field could be used as
comparison samples). This would, for cxample, be
a possible (partial) explanation for how it might
have gone with Andrej Holm in the case against
the militante gruppe (mg), at least if one assumes
that the BKA did not just Google “gentrification”,
so 1 thinkit is quite possible that such analyses are
also carried out

Methods of author recognition and
author profiling

Al this, however, only considers what the BKA
claims to be able to do and takes these considera-
tions to some logical conclusions. But how does
author recognition or author profiling actually
work?

Who hasn't felt the
teacher will expose you after a mocking poem
about a teacher appeared in the washrooms and
the whole school is making fun of how only you
could have written *vacuur” [ Leerer] instead of
“teacher” [ Lelrer]. Fortunately, the entire German
faculty fell for it, adopting the narrative of aspelling
mistake and turning a blind eye to the all-too-
accurate pun. Forensic linguistics does seem to

require a bit of practice, or at least a criminological
‘motivation, who knows. In any case, error analysis,
which most have probably heard of, was one of the
BKA's most important analysis tools around 2002
alongwith style analysis, according to a promotional
article by language cop Christa Baldauf. Spelling
‘mistakes, grammatical crrors, punctuation, but
also typos, new or old spelling, hints on keyboard
peculiaritics, ctc., all this serves the language cops
to collect clues about the author. For example, if
1 write “muf” instead of *
clue that I missed some of the more recent spelling
reforms when I was in school.1f,on the other hand,
I constantly write terms that, according to spelling
rules, use “R”and not ss” it could mean that there

ss”, that could be a

s no “8” on my keyboard. For example, if I speak
of “dem Butter” [rather than “die Butter') it could
be a reference to the fact that | grew up in Bavaria,
ete. But I could also be faking all these things just
to mislead the language cops. The plausibility of
my error profile is also part of such an analysis
Similarly stylstic analysis examines peculiariies of
‘mywriting style. What kind of terms do I use, docs
‘my sentence structure show specific patterns, arc
there repeated constellations of terms that may cven
appear in different texts,cte.2 I think everyone who
takes a closer look at his or her texts will recognize
some stylistic characteristics of their own.

Such qualitative analyses primarily serves to profile
the authors. While it is certainly possible to match
different texts in this way, the real value of such
analyses lies in being able to determine things like
age,“level of cducation’’,“scene affilation”, regional
origins, and sometimes perhaps even indications
of oceupation/training, ctc. Attempts to determine
things like gender arc also heard of, but generally
do not secm to be quite as straightforward.
In contrast, there are also more quantitative and
statistical analyses that examine everything from
ward frequencies to word constellations to syntax
sentence structure that can be measured in this way.
“These methods, known asstylometry, are sometimes
very controversial because it is not possible to say
exactly what they are meant to measure, but they
sometimes deliver astonishing results, especially in
combination with machine learning approaches. I
think that these approaches are thercfore likely to
be used primarily o cluster different texts according
to their similarities.

“The clear advantage of such quantitative analyses is
that they can be performed en masse. All digitally
available or digitizable texts can be analyzed in
this way. From social media posts to books, texts
can be capturcd using these methods. Although
the success of these methods is currently still
relatively modest, and it has often turned out that
supposedly similar texts are often more similar in
their genre than in their authorship, if one assumes
that individual writing styles could certainly leave
behind quantitative patterns, this means that once
these patterns are known, a mass assignment of
texts to certain authors will be possible.

And now what?

There were and are, of course, various approaches to
dealing with this knowledge, one not better or worse:
than another. Those who do not write communiqués
anyway largely avoid this problem, but are still
affected by the problem of participation in publi-
cations and authorship of other texts. Whoever
obseures texts before publication, for example,
by having several people successively rewrite and
rephrase passages from them, etc., runs the risk of
also developing exploitable linguistic and stylistic
characteristics in repeatedly similar constellations
or also of filing to successfully conceal character-
istics. Whoever thinks that they can dismiss the
whole thing because none of their text samples
are available or also because they are convinced
that the legal value of author recognition is too
shaky, risks that in the future text samples might
somehow be available (for example because they are
successfully convicted of authorship) or the legal
assessment of the procedure changes. Those who
trust that technology is not (yet) good enough may
be surprised by future developments. Those who usc:
technical solutions to obscure their authorship run
the risk of leaving new characteristics and traces,
andalso of producing poorly written communiqués
that no one wants o read anyway. If you never write
any texts regardless, you just don't writc any texts.

So do whatever appeals to you most, but do it
from now on—if you haven't alrcady—keeping
these traces in mind and the queasy fecling in
your stomach, which is said to have saved many
person from making a careless mistake at the
crucial moment.

10
A brief overview of modern forensic
linguistics methods for determining
authorship. The following article tries
to give an overview from a non-
technical perspective and to make a
corresponding evaluation.

NoTrace Project / No trace, no case. A collection of tools to
help anaschists and other rebels understand the capabilitics of

their enemies, undermine surveillance cfforts, and ultimately
act without getting caught.

Depending on your context, possession of certain documents may be criminalized or atract
umvanted atention. Be careful about what zines you print and where you store them.