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.