Roleplay

There are many reasons for us for consciously creating multiple, fake, anonymous or pseudonymous identities online (without becoming the petty tyrants we fight):

• Engaging in the present with no need for past or future references.
• Being who you are naturally and freeing your speech.
• Dreaming another you into being for gaming, hobbies, (online) roleplay, trolling the trolls, defense from mass surveillance, confusing surveillance, etc. in a way that it doesn’t automatically become a part of your finger- and footprint.
• Being more resilient online.
• Career actualisation, increased individuality, autonomy and freedom by separating professional and private information.
• Exploring abandonment of being, and gaining recognition on how your "usual identity" can be a trap.
• Challenging yourself and engaging at the edge.
• Feeding (r)evolution and self-authority.

This page focuses on roleplay for teh lulz. Love it or hate it, the Anonymous mask has morphed under many guises. Starting life as the face of an audacious revolutionary, it became a trickster political disguise turned corporate nightmare. According to some, it’s future as a potent image remains in the balance, but the story is still ongoing.

Because I am here.

Choose an avatar

• Become comfortable with the context a character is for if you have time to do so. Each context has it's own "flavour" and part of having fun with your character is knowing what is and what isn't possible within a particular (set of) context(s). The context can also be a source of inspiration for picking your character.
• Ask yourself what you want to do with the role. For example, if you are going to elicit in your role your energy must match the role you are going to play. If your personality or mental makeup doesn’t enable you to easily play a particular role then don’t try.
• Ask around. Give those elicitation skills a whirl with the other players. Find out what roles others are interested in playing. Having a diversity of skills and characters in the game is key to having a great time. So ask around, find out what others are interested in playing.
• Do not choose a character you feel uncomfortable with. Not even if it is "missing".
• Great if you challenge yourself. Not so great if it stresses you out unnecessarily.
• Take time to experiment.

Give your avatar a story

An increasing number of psychologists argue that people living in modern societies give meaning to their lives by constructing and internalising self-defining stories.

Whatever, the practice of "story telling for identity" seems much older to me and starting a new avatar with a story makes it a lot easier to maintain the role. You can make up your own story, use a "known" person’s story (for example place a historical figure in contemporary settings), or add the storyline of a god or goddess (placing a character with story in another context than where the story originated can be quite fun), a "group identity" like anonymous (which isn't a group), ...

Plausible deniability

According to the urban dictionary "plausible deniability" is a condition in which a subject can safely and believeably deny knowledge of any particular truth that may exist because the subject is deliberately made unaware of said truth so as to benefit or shield the subject from any responsibility associated through the knowledge of such truth. More on its legalisation in the US in [Surveillance#Legalities|Surveillance legalities].

Adding plausible deniability patterns to a role or simulation can be useful, as surveillance systems can correlate all kinds of information yet cannot interpret non-information (best if humans not try so often either because the abyss can stare back :D) nor can bayesian logic deal with the difference between excellence in roleplay and ignorance (see Confusing surveillance systems). Adding plausible deniability elements in a simulation can lead to discussions about exceptionalism and the difference between "lawful" and "legal".

See plausible deniability applied in:

• networking - relaying certain types of broadcasts automatically in such a way that the original transmitter of a file is indistinguishable from those who are merely relaying it allows for the person who first transmitted the file to claim that his computer had merely relayed it from elsewhere, and this claim cannot be disproven without a complete decrypted log of all network connections to and from that person's computer. The freenet file sharing network and censorship workarounds such as tor obfuscate data sources and flows to protect operators and users of the network by preventing them (and by extension, observers such as censors) from knowing where data comes from and where it is stored. See Anonymising your traffic with linux.
• deniable disk encryption - using steganographic techniques where the very existence of an encrypted file or message is deniable in the sense that an adversary cannot prove that an encrypted message exists.

Simulation games

Games and simulations can be powerful tools for exposing the nature of problems and exploring scenario planning paths, communication and are a structured approach to instruction, not necessarily excluding each other.

The advantages gaming and simulations offer over traditional "teaching" are:

• putting emphasis on questioning over answering - see questioning the surveillance system
• providing opportunities to examine assumptions and implications underlying decisions.

Some simulations and plays can be done individually, others are a group activity where players cooperate or compete, some are run to explore in what ways we can get to a desired state, some to observe the effects of start and boundary condition changes, some rules are explicit, others are implicit and to be discovered. Debriefing or retrospectives after play is a usual and valuable component, particularly if it's an educational game/simulation. For this reason many multi-purpose simulations include observer roles.

When a scenario is added to a game, it becomes a simulation. For an example of that see scenario planning simulation in The Alpha Complex.

Resources

Social Engineering

• DEFCON 14: Beyond Social Engineering: Tools for Reinventing Yourself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-FPJ6lpRYU
• Information Elicitation via Social Engineering http://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/410.html
• Using Embedded Commands in Social Engineering http://karstenjohansson.blogspot.nl/2010/04/using-embedded-commands-in-social.html (example of preloading)

Linguistic author identification

• The meta book and size-dependent properties of written language http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4385 (2009)
• On Linguistic Fingerprinting http://thelousylinguist.blogspot.nl/2009/12/on-linguistic-fingerprinting.html (2009)
• The role of forensic linguistics in crime investigation http://www.academia.edu/3573524/The_Role_of_Forensic_Linguistics_in_Crime_Investigation (2012)

Linguistic fingerprinting

• The Science of Self-report: Implications for Research and Practice http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/pennebaker/reprints/Symptom00.pdf

Linguistic hacking

• Linguistic Hacking [24c3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3TYMmKxbqA

Plausible deniability

• DEF CON 14 - weasel: The Plausible Deniability Toolkit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYIFOjqfgN0 The slides of the presentation (pdf) http://www.nmrc.org/pub/pdtk/pdk_final.pdf

Perceptual control theory

• PCT—Yeah? So What?! http://www.iapct.org/festschrift/carey.html
• Non-computer-based demonstrations http://bluwiki.com/go/Perceptual_control_theory/Demonstrations#Non-computer-based_demonstrations

Related

• Creating a new online identity
• Psychological warfare
• Scenario planning
• Self-dox
• Installing linux
• Trolling