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HOW TO LIE TO PEOPLE: ACHIEVING ANONYMITY THROUGH DISINFORMATION AND DATA POISONING
[Part the First]

[antikopyright 2007]

Preamble 
When providing information, the worst thing you could 
possibly do is give accurate, truthful data. This should 
be common sense. If it’s not, close this text and think 
about why it should be, then come back when you’re ready or 
fuck off for good. However, the recourse that many have 
chosen, the proverbial vow of silence, is no panacea. 

Actively choosing to refuse to provide information, to 
give the bloodhounds nothing, will make them uneasy, hungry, 
suspicious, and, of course, quite vicious. What one must 
then do is quite simple: give them a false trail to follow. 

In other words: Lie to people. All the time. About everything. 
Going further, create future lies. Lies that lie in hidden 
corners just waiting to be stumbled onto by the coming 
bloodhounds, who will then think they’ve stumbled onto 
something genuine. Your goal must then be to proactively 
mold pieces of shit into gold nuggets. Plant your buried scat 
treasure and watch the fuckers suck it down. The aim must 
always be to present the illusion of transparency, an ‘I’ve 
got nothing to hide’ hologram, if you will. 

In short: your goal is to go around the web planting poisonous 
seeds of disinformation, with the intention that others who 
will try to track you at a later date will stumble onto them 
and think them to be real. The rest of this brief guide will 
be about general tips for creating disinformation to preserve 
your anonymity, it is obviously hardly exhaustive, and is meant 
to serve as a springboard for inspiring your own acts of data 
poisoning. However, as this guide is operating under the impression
 that most people currently do not actively engage in data poisoning, 
 this guide also doubles as a stalker’s companion. Pretty convenient, 
 indeed. 

Before You Begin 
Before you’re ready to engage in proactive data poisoning, you 
first need to do a wee bit of preliminary research. Pick a name 
for yourself, as well as a unique username (something that when 
searched for, will only return your name, not 50 million others), 
email address, as well as a birthday, location, pets, family, 
hobbies, car, political affiliation, and other basic demographic 
information. Keep in mind that your intention with this data is 
that each nugget can and should be used to track you, that is 
indeed your goal in the creation of this false front (i.e., if 
your new username is a reference to a television show which 
the real you would never watch, start posting on fan message 
boards and newsgroups for that show, this is discussed further 
in the section on fabricating your peripheral identity later in 
this text). 

A key ingredient in the successful passing of illusion as reality 
is consistency. This means that once you pick your initial 
disinformative characteristics, you’ll have to stick with 
them for all locales you later frequent (e.g., use the same 
username on all forums, and tell different people the same lies). 
After you have the initial information, here are a few more things 
you might want to take care of (again, these are just a couple 
examples to prod your own brain into thinking of more shit on its own):

~ Find a few photos of some unpopular person on social networking 
sites like MySpace or Facebook, or on public photo storage places 
akin to Flickr. These will now be your photos. Pick someone of 
average physical prowess, someone who doesn’t have too many 
friends/contacts listed, doesn’t live anywhere near you, doesn’t 
frequent the same web fora that you do, and, most importantly, 
someone whom you and any of your legitimate contacts are not 
affiliated with in any way whatsoever. 

	- Try opening the photo file in a text or hex editor. 
	If it is an unmodified file taken with a digital camera, 
	you should see various nuggets of metadata imbedded in the 
	file, such as the date the picture was taken, the 
	resolution/camera settings, and, most importantly, 
	the camera model. This will now be your camera. Find a 
	forum for this camera, or failing that, a forum for amateur 
	photography, and make a few posts asking some basic questions 
	about the camera. When someone then searches for you and examines 
	the metadata of your images, your identity will thus further 
	be validated in their bloodthirsty, datahungry eyes. 


	Any data match serves to validate your illusory identity, 
	any data discrepancy serves to question it.

	- Once you have the photos, open them up and perform a 
	minor modification such as adding an extra pixel. This 
	is to change the MD5 checksum of the image file. Each file 
	has a unique number that can be shown by using programs 
	like ChaosMD5. By modifying the file, you are also modifying 
	the MD5 checksum. This is done so that, should anyone later 
	be performing comparisons/searches by MD5, your stolen image 
	will not be presented as a match, therefore improving the 
	chances that your false identity will not be discovered. 

~If you wish to, create a phone number for yourself, there are plenty of 
free services such as www.j2.com which give you a free voicemail box and 
fax number. Often times the free services do not let you pick your own 
area code, in which case you will have to make sure that your location 
matches the area code. If your free number requires a call every X days 
to be kept active, use a free service akin to www.phonemyphone.com to 
place the call. Websites such as http://www.allareacodes.com/ provide 
lists of area codes and the states to which they belong, while sites 
allow you to locate the city within a state by using the prefix 
(the first three digits after the area code). When performing reverse 
phone lookups on site like whitepages DOT com/10001/reverse_phone be 
aware that the phone service provider may also be visible. In keeping 
with our consistency motif, never contradict this data (with natural 
exceptions, such as if you’re stating that you recently moved from X 
to Y in your fake blog, thus implicitly explaining the geographical
 discrepancy of the phone number’s location and your present residence). 

Creating the Core You 
Once you have acquired what you feel is a sufficient amount of 
preliminary disinformation, it is time to start actively engaging 
in its proliferation; that is, the fun and tedious process of data 
poisoning. Ten years ago, I would’ve told you to create a personal 
homepage for yourself. Today, homepages are obsolete and unnecessary 
(though if you have the time, additional data poisoning can’t hurt; 
that is, unless you half ass it). Instead, you should set up your 
core identity on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, 
as well as on blog sites like LiveJournal and Xanga. Create your 
personal pages using the fake data you generated in the step above: 
listing your name, email, birth date, hobbies, favorite music, photos, 
and so on. These are known as the core sites, because they will be 
the main websites that any bloodhound on your trail will discover 
first, and which will contain the greatest amount of information 
about you. 

Creating the Periphery You 
After you setup the core sites, you will need to extend your 
data poisoning to various periphery outposts to further 
entrench the legitimacy of your faux identity. Although the 
periphery you is secondary to the core, it is no less essential; 
indeed, perhaps more so. The role of the periphery is to dupe the 
meticulous bloodhound who will spend hours mining through search 
results, harvesting little shit nuggets here and there, and looking 
for any inconsistencies that might suggest duplicity. In other words, 
take the task of creating the periphery as seriously as the core. 

Now then, to create the periphery you must cannibalize upon your 
initial information. If you said you like a certain band, start 
posting on the message boards for that band, being sure to indicate 
that you went to any relevant concerts close to your geographic area. 
If you said you have a certain exotic pet, start posting on newsgroups 
and message boards asking for advice on taking care of said pet. Rinse 
and repeat for all other periphery components of your identity: your car, 
favorite book/author/movie/pornstar, favorite hobby, sport team, and so on. 

Always post on all message boards with the same username. This will make 
you easier to track, and make the bloodhound smile when ze thinks that ze’s 
just discovered that you not only like Korn, but also have a pet 
ferret and drive a pimped out Audi. 

And lest you’re by this point losing faith at the apparently humdrum 
meaninglessness of it all, keep in mind that there is no such thing as
 an insignificant detail. Every bit of information can be, and, indeed 
 is, being harvested and subsequently has the potential for being used 
 for tracking you the fuck down. To give a (non)trivial example, someone 
 who knows where you live, the car you drive, and the band you like, can 
 then proceed to find you outside of a concert hall on the night that your 
 band’s playing. Copasetic? 

Realtime Data Poisoning and Time Syncing 
Once you have setup the core/periphery disinfo centres, your job 
isn’t quite done yet. Indeed, data poisoning is a persistent process 
around which you must adapt all of your everyday actions, both online 
and offline. Each time you chat with friends over instant messaging or 
IRC, you are leaking data. Comments about the weather, current events,
 even your speech mannerisms, all serve to betray your identity, and 
 therefore must all be modified. You must then engage in realtime data 
 poisoning: consistently lying to anyone and everyone you communicate 
 with about everything. 

An extension of realtime poisoning is time syncing. If you say you 
have a 9 to 5 job in time zone X, then be sure that you’re idle 
during those times, or explicitly mention that you have Internet 
access from work/school to present a resolution to the apparent 
time conflict. Do this proactively, meaning volunteer the information 
yourself, before the person on the other end becomes suspicious. 
Saying something like ‘I just came back from watching Lesbian Scat 
Girls VII’ when according to your time zone you should be at work/school 
can be disastrous to your identity (speaking of time zones, don’t forget 
to set the appropriate zone on all of your forums). However, we all slip 
up and fuck up here and there. Such discrepancies can then be explained 
away with relative ease by stating that you had the day off school or 
whatnot, as long as they don’t accumulate to an excess over prolonged 
periods of time. 

When chatting, it is further advantageous to initiate apparently 
accidental data slippages. Pretend that you thought you were talking 
to someone else, and share a seemingly intimate bit of information 
about yourself, and then follow it up with a ‘oh fuck, wrong person.’ 
Similar techniques should be used by accidentally pasting private 
emails into instant messaging conversations, and then hurriedly 
explaining that your fershlugginer copy and paste keeps jamming, 
and urging your chat partner to pay the information no heed.

As aforementioned, your very speech patterns betray your identity. 
In the spirit of practicing what you preach, looking a few lines 
above you can see that I used a seemingly odd adjective, ‘fershlugginer.’ 
Doing a little bit of research, you’ll undoubtedly find that it was a 
term popularized by MAD Magazine in the 70’s, leading you to believe 
I must be an old school fan of that particular zine ;), which will 
in turn lead you to make now intrinsic assumptions about my age, 
nationality, and so forth. Therefore, you must always strive to 
saturate your everyday parlance with various cultural (and therefore 
also potentially geographic) references. If you are communicating via 
phone or voip, which is highly inadvisable as extensive forensic 
analysis of voiceprints can reveal your real identity even when you’re 
attempting to adopt various masking techniques, you should nonetheless 
use a hardware or software voice modification application, at the very 
least. 

Realtime data can further be poisoned by injecting false descriptions of 
everyday events. Saying you just got your hair highlighted, a spiffy 
new tattoo, or even a broken leg, are all as essential as the 
aforementioned core/periphery identity modifiers. Again, keep in mind 
the physical location you’re supposed to be situated in, and after 
checking the weather for that day, make appropriate comments about 
how how/cold it is, and so on it goes…

End of Part I 
Finally, keep in mind that if the so-called first rule of forensics 
is Locard’s theory--every contact leaves a trace--then a necessary 
corollary is that every false contact leaves a false trace. 

Again: there is no such thing as innocuous data. 

Every little morsel of information is engorged with saliency, and 
every little morsel can likewise be manipulated to suit your 
needs; in our case, the poisoning of the unknowing bloodhounds 
on your illusory trail. Consistently lie your ass off to achieve 
the much-thought after ambrosia of anonymity. 

Please let me know of any questions, suggestions, or any other 
comments you have, so that I can adequately address them in Part II, 
which will feature more examples of data poisoning for you to perform 
in your everyday interactions. 


Email: xcon0 a|t| y\a/h\\o\o//d|.o.|t c//o|m. 
For phone sex, dial 1-610-887-6072

Enjoy! :)