[Pkg-privacy-maintainers] Anti-Stylommetry Tools

[bancfc at openmailbox.org]

Hi Whonix guy here.

A major tool of interest for anonymity distros is anti-stylommetry 
protection. During his conversations with journalists Snowden was 
worried about capabilities that unmasked authors based on their writing 
styles. [0]

There is good news and bad news. Good news - a privacy protecting tool 
that masks writing styles exists (Anonymouth [1]) and is publicly 
available from Drexel university researchers. A related tool in their 
suite that matches styles is called JStylo [2] which is forked from an 
actively developed tool: JGAAP [3].

Bad news - the last commit to Anonymouth was from 2013 and though some 
people managed to get it to build they ran into some showstopping bugs. 
[4] It uses OpenJDK 8 but it relies on Eclipse to build which I found a 
pain to work with. No Maven build support yet.

The situation doesn't look too good and there's not much we can change 
from outside but IMO even if the protection tool itself is not 
functional then maybe the adversarial component may still help users see 
how closely their anonymous posts match previous writing samples before 
publishing. So maybe packaging JGAAP is still useful?

***

[0] http://www.b3rn3d.com/blog/2014/01/31/tools-styometrics/
[1] https://github.com/psal/anonymouth
[2] https://github.com/psal/jstylo
[3] https://github.com/evllabs/JGAAP
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12194720