Being Proactive

1. Reduce the amount of comparison text for LE to compare you with, this goes with having a small clearnet footprint as well [reducing the power of OSINT].
2. Use a word processor to fix any grammatical errors that you regularly encounter.
3. Reduce or change the idioms that you use on the darknet.
4. Understand how your alias affects your writing style, is your alias younger, older, more educated, or less educated? If your alias is older maybe speak in a more JRR Tolkien style of writing, again this is up to you.
5. Pay attention to how your slang and spelling identify you. If you are from the UK you say maths, if you are from the USA you say math. It does not matter how you say maths, all that matters is that it can be used to identify you. This also applies to slang, many regions have different and extremely particular slang. You do not ask someone from the USA for a rubber and expect them to give you an eraser as an example.
6. Pay attention to your use of emoticons, in the previous DPR example, the DEA agent was able to make a correct assumption that DPR was likely young because he did not use a hyphen when making a smiley emoticon.
7. Pay attention to how you structure your writing, do you use two spaces after a period? Do you constantly use parenthesis in your writing?
8. Consider what symbols you use in your writing do you use £’s or $’s?

What Different Linguistic Choices Say About You

EMOTICONS:

1. Russians use ) instead of 🙂 or 🙂 to express a smiley face.
2. Scandinavians use =) instead of 🙂 or 🙂 for a smiley face.
3. Younger people generally do not use a hyphen in their smiley faces.

STRUCTURAL FEATURES

1. Two spaces after a period give off the impression that you are older, due to the fact that this is how typing was taught to people learning to type with typewriters. Hence one of the reasons that I think Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto is due to the similarities of their writing styles, with this as one of the examples.
2. In America, people write numbers out with commas between numbers to the left of the starting number and with periods between numbers to the right of the starting number. This is in contrast to how people write out numbers on the rest of the earth.

UK: 1,000.00

European nations: 1.000,00

SPELLING SLANG AND SYMBOLS:

1. Obviously, people in different nations use different slang so pay attention to your use of slang. This is even more pronounced when you use slang that is not as well known in other nations such as someone from the UK mentioning a headmaster when in other nations it is referred to as a principle.
2. Spelling is another important factor that is similar to slang, except it is harder to control. If you want to pretend that you are from the USA however you live in Australia it only takes one time of spelling color as color to let people understand that someone is up.
3. Some people also spell words in a particular way that is not regional for example you might spell ax as an axe or vice versa.
4. Of course, the symbols you use on your keyboard can give a lot of information away, such as £’s or $

Techniques to Prevent Whiteprint

Translate Technique

Use a website or software such as google translate to translate between different languages before translating back to your original language. This might take a lot of translations, and will also probably require you to edit your message before posting it. To use Google translate in tor make sure to use the mobile version.

Word Processor Technique

Use a word processor preferably LibreOffice to write on before pasting a message into a website such as Dread. This is helpful in multiple ways, first: this allows you to fix the most finger printable mistakes which are typing mistakes, second: this allows you to also prevent another type of tracking that monitors how you type, although this should not be relevant on a site that does not use javascript.

Word Processor Advanced

TechniqueThis is similar to the last technique, though it is more advance. This involves using, a pinch of disinformation. First, this grants you all the same protection from typing tracking and grammatical error tracking, however, it also as previously mentioned allows you to use disinformation. First decide upon a list of words that you frequently don’t misspell, maybe the words grammatical, symbol, and pronounced [this list should include more words]. Now go into your preferred word processor, and change your auto-correct settings. For this I will be using LibreOffice because it is FOSS, first go to the top setting bar, then click on Tools, next click on AutoCorrect, and then AutoCorrect options [Tools > AutoCorrect > AutoCorrect Options]. From here enter your list of words that you have decided on as advised above, put the correct spelling in the “Replace” box, and the desired misspelling in the “With” box. Now that you have done this whenever you type let us say: grammatical it autocorrects to the word grammatical. This is just the first step, in providing misinformation against linguistic fingerprinting.

Next, find a list of words that you commonly use in your writing. Let us say that I love to use contractions when I write, maybe I always use words such as: can’t don’t, shouldn’t, won’t, or let’s. Well, maybe I want to go into LibreOffice and add in statements to automatically replace all contractions with the full versions of the words [can’t, don’t, shouldn’t, won’t, let’s > cannot, do not, should not, will not, let us]. Do you see how this can make a large difference in your writing and give a difference in how people and most importantly LE perceives of you? You can change most words to be different, as an example you can change huge to large in the LibreOffice AutoCorrect box. Just make sure these words fit with your alias.

Finally, I want to go over changing your word choice to fit a geographic location, maybe you live in the USA and you want to give the impression that your alias is from the UK for example, you can make use of location-based spelling and lexicon. I will say this here: this is extremely risky, and one mistake can give it away. Now that I’m done with this warning I will give you some tips on how to properly pull this off. First off you need to decide where you want to give the impression of your location. As I mentioned before I will be explaining how to do this if you want to give off the impression that you are from the USA, or from the UK. First off you need to understand a thing or two about where your alias is “from”, don’t pretend that you are from the UK, yet have no idea about it other than it exists. After you have decided upon a good location that your alias is from research the differences in language between the two languages. Thanks to the internet this is quite easy, you can find Wikipedia pages highlighting the regional differences in languages between two nations. Pay attention to how certain words are spelled [meter> meter], and what words are exchanged with each other [boot > trunk]. Now that you have a list of words that can be exchanged with each other, and a list of spelling that is different add your desired spelling to the AutoCorrect box in LibreOffice, and there you go.