[Cryptography] Mail Lists In the Post-Snowden Era

[Michael Kjörling]

On 21 Oct 2013 04:39 -0600, from gdr at gno.org (Devin Reade):
> As an aside, on a public list or bulletin board (anonymous or not)
> I would be surprised if there is not software in existence that
> could correlate poster's mannerisms against publicly available
> non-anonymized postings to in effect de-anonymize the supposedly
> anonymous postings with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

There has at least been publicly done research on the matter. See for
example this March 2011 blog post by Bruce Schneier,

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/using_language.html

which references a web page which unfortunately since then appears to
have been taken off the 'Net, but The Wayback Machine has a copy at

http://web.archive.org/web/20110309083523/http://www.concordia.ca/now/what-we-do/research/20110307/identifying-anonymous-email-authors.php

I doubt a major government agency could not do something similar, and
probably better.

-- 
Michael Kjörling • http://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
                “People who think they know everything really annoy
                those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)