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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

It makes one wonder how many people will create a fictional facebook 'experience' which is to say spend time building up an alternate identity in various social sites so that in the event they are charged with a heinous crime they can confuse the jury and make it seem 'out of character.'

Surveillance works best when it isn't scripted.

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That kind of thing definitely goes on in the intelligence community

One of the leaked HBGary e-mails is about developing a tool to automate it, including completely fake subgraphs.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/18/hbgarys-high-volume.htm... http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The...

> building up an alternate identity in various social sites

I wonder when we will see the startups that offer this as a personalized service. It can be equally responsive to law enforcement, should actual legal processes are involved, but for any other actor besides the law, the illusion can be real.

In Vinge's novel Rainbow's End, there is a group called the Friends of Privacy which basically exists to obfuscate and inject noise into the identifying information found online.

I really need to read this.

If anyone needs convincing, Vinge published a similar story for free in IEEE Spectrum, complete with the "Friends of Privacy," called Synthetic Serendipity. http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serend...

It's "Rainbows End". The absence of the apostrophe really is important, since it completely changes the meaning of those two words.

It's very expensive to reliably maintain such alternate identity. Almost always it's much cheaper just not to commit felonies.

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