Anonlaw

The problem of harassment from anonymous Internet trolls is hardly new. The topic has a rich enough history to merit New York Times (NYT), Wikipedia and How Stuff Works articles, of which, the NYT story is far-and-away one of the most fascinating things you can read for free on the Internet.

A quick Google search reveals a wealth of content alternately rating the all-time-best trolls, explaining how to troll, and/or describing strategies for dealing with trolls.  XKCD once published this hilarious cartoon on the topic: Troll Slayer.

In truth, Internet trolling can often be amusing and harmless. This was the case with Mark V. Shaney, a program that generated nonsensical, but quasi-intelligent text and posted it to Usenet to trick people into conversing with a computer when they believed they were having a conversation with a real, albeit off-kilter person.

There are, however, circumstances where individuals cross the line, and a hoax becomes tortious, or worse, criminal. In one famous case, a prankster created a fake Bloomburg News website and successfully manipulated a stock price. The NYT reports:

Using a personal World Wide Web site intended to look like an Internet page of Bloomberg News, someone posted a fake report early yesterday that said an American technology company called Pairgain Technologies Inc. was being taken over by an Israeli rival for a hefty price. The report spread to a Yahoo message board and then to other sites frequented by stock traders, who quickly bid up Pairgain’s stock by more than 30 percent.

(NYT, Fake News Account On Web Site Sends Stock Price Soaring, April 8, 1999.)

In other cases, anonymous Internet harassment has arguably lead to more dire consequences. Lori Drew, for example, was convicted in federal court of misdemeanor computer fraud “for her involvement in creating a phony account on MySpace to [play a trick on] a teenager, who later committed suicide.” (NYT, Verdict in MySpace Suicide Case, November 26, 2008.)

These examples are by no means exhaustive. Hundreds of instances of Internet harassment, defamation, stock manipulation, stalking and fraud are a mere Google search away.  Some of these schemes are perpetrated by trolls, in the classic sense. Others are perpetrated with criminal intent. Regardless, if you are unfortunate enough to become a victim, the trickiest part of making yourself whole can often be identifying the culprit.

If you are legally or technically savvy enough to do so, discovering the Internet Protocol (IP) address associated with a tortious communication should be one of your first steps. According to ICANN, the international organization assigned to manage and coordinate Internet addresses:

IP addresses are the numbers assigned to computer network interfaces. Although we use names to refer to the things we seek on the Internet, such as www.example.org, computers translate these names into numerical addresses so they can send data to the right location. So when you send an email, visit a web site, or participate in a video conference, your computer sends data packets to the IP address of the other end of the connection and receives packets destined for its own IP address.

(ICANN, Beginner’s Guide to Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses, accessed March 16, 2011.)

An IP address, however, merely points to a computer or a router, not a person. In the case of a stationary computer, the IP address cannot tell you who was at the keyboard. In the case of a router, the IP address only identifies the router itself, not the connected devices, and certainly not the individuals using those devices. If the IP address refers to a foreign proxy server or a Tor exit node, the problems are compounded. Depending on the circumstances, it could be difficult, cost prohibitive or impossible to positively identify the sender of the communication by an IP address alone.

That said, an IP address is often a nice piece of circumstantial evidence. It can help narrow your range of suspects, and, when used in conjunction with other identifying evidence, it can help support your case for identifying the culprit. So, what other forms of identifying evidence do you need? Thanks to recent research, a small number of writing samples is one possible answer.

In a new article by Farkhund Iqbal, Rachid Hadjidj, Benjamin C.M. Fung, Mourad Debbabi titled “A Novel Approach of Mining Write-Prints for Authorship Attribution in E-mail Forensics” (mirror here), the authors propose a fairly sophisticated method for analyzing suspects’ writing samples, identifying recurrent factors and patterns that make up the suspect’s “write-print” (style, word choice, common grammatical errors, et cetera), and then comparing the suspect’s write-print to the write-print of the problem communication.

In the words of the authors:

In forensic science, an individual can be uniquely identified by his/her fingerprint. Similarly, in cyber forensics, an investigator would like to identify the ‘‘write-print’’ of an individual from his/her e-mails and use it for authorship attribution.

The authors tested their proposal using data from the publicly-available Enron email database and achieved remarkably accurate results (in the 80% range) when using a modest sample of the test-suspects’ emails (about 16 emails each for 6 suspects). In a civil lawsuit, where the evidentiary standard is “more likely than not,” a methodology with an 80% average success rate may be sufficient to get your expert in front of a jury if the other identifying evidence is consistent.

In short, if you can use IP information to narrow your range of suspects, and your attorney can collect and authenticate a reasonable number of writing samples, an expert employing the Iqbal write-print analysis could remove some guesswork from identifying your culprit.  Although the write-print study was conducted with emails, there is no reason the same analysis would not work with message board, blog, or newspaper comment posts.

In closing, please note that not every instance of harassment is actionable, and using a court to strip another person of their online anonymity generally raises First Amendment and a variety of other legal issues.  If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of needing to identify an offending John Doe, consult your attorney.