[chaos0]

I wonder if there is a tool to obfuscate text to prevent analysis. one way I could think of is to use any online translation tool to translate to a foreign language and then back to english. and then fix the grammar slightly. the structure of the text should hopefully be different enough for any tool/human to recognize it's your style. is there an easier way to do this?

[bumblebeard]

There was an interesting talk about this (adversarial stylometry) at 28C3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SgAOcCm0I

One of the methods they mentioned is machine translation, but they found that it wasn't terribly useful. It's a really neat talk and I highly recommend it. They also wrote some software to anonymize texts (Anonymouth) and their stylometry software (JStylo) is also freely available:

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4781.en.h...

[privong]

There is some free software available[0] to do stylometry analysis. And some software which purports to assist in anonymizing writings[1]. I've not really played around with either, so I can't speak to their ease of use and/or effectiveness. But it's at least somewhere to start.

[0] http://evllabs.com/jgaap/w/index.php/Main_Page

[1] https://github.com/psal/anonymouth

[a3_nm]

A pretty neat idea, but of course if you use an online tool you would still be disclosing the original text to an untrusted third party...

[graedus]

Yeah, some work has been done in this area, but I only know about it in passing via a mention in one of Jacob Appelbaum's talks. This seems like it might be a decent place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E

[TeMPOraL]

Reminds me of a concept of "google translate fixed point", i.e. you translate between english and an foreign language back and forth until the translation stops changing.

[pelario]

Interesting, however, I would not use google translate to obfuscate my writing, as it might appear in google logs :)

[TeMPOraL]

:). Speaking of which, can you recommend any non-Google online translation tool?