No Such Thing as Anonymous Blogging?

TechSoup recently republished Ethan Zuckerman's Technical Guide to Anonymous Blogging, but according to a recent Boing Boing post (quoting a Wired News article), your days of ranting anonymously may be numbered:

A federally-funded artificial intelligence lab is figuring out how to track people over the Internet, based on how they write.

The University of Arizona's ultra-ambitious "Dark Web" project "aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web," the National Science Foundation notes. And that analysis, according to the Arizona Star, includes a program which "identif[ies] and track[s] individual authors by their writing styles."

While the project emphasizes terrorist content, the project also has implications for whistle-blowers, activist organizations worldwide, and potentially even ordinary citizens. And if you think that couldn't ever mean you, you may want to check out Frontline's excellent Spying on the Homefront, which PBS recently re-aired and which you can watch online.

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