Who wrote the Trump White House ‘resistance’ letter? We asked some forensic linguists
Who wrote the Trump White House ‘resistance’ letter? We asked some forensic linguists - On Wednesday, a senior staffer in the White House of Donald Trump anonymously published an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that he was one of many administration officials actively working as part of a “resistance” to “frustrate parts of (Trump’s) agenda and his worst inclinations.”
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders called the author a “gutless loser.” Meanwhile, hundreds of analysts both amateur and professional were up late into Wednesday night scrutinizing the text for clues as to its creator.
The National Post called on professionals who do “forensic linguistics” for a living. Here is what they told us.
It’s probably not Mike Pence, even if he does say “lodestar” a lot
Throughout Wednesday, speculation was rife that the author was none other than Vice-President Mike Pence. This was all based on one piece of evidence: the use of the somewhat outdated word “lodestar.” Pence says “lodestar” a lot; in one supercut compiled by Buzzfeed, Pence could be seen using the term — roughly a synonym for “beacon” — five times in televised speeches or interviews. The op-ed also uses the term “first principles,” a military-esque term often used by Secretary of Defence James Mattis. Claire Hardaker, a forensic linguist at Lancaster University, suspects that the insertion of these terms is not an accident. “If you wanted to throw off the scent, these are precisely the kinds of eye-catching breadcrumbs you would leave in your writing to lead people astray,” she told the Post (she was also skeptical forensic linguistics could work in this case). And indeed, staffers in the Trump White House have admitted that they do engage in these kinds of deceptions when leaking to the press. “To cover my tracks, I usually pay attention to other staffers’ idioms and use that in my background quotes,” one White House leaker told Axios.com in May.
There probably isn’t going to be a “smoking gun”
Arguably the most famous moment in forensic linguistics came in the mid-1990s, when it was used to help identify and convict terrorist Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. His manifesto included the term “you can’t eat your cake and have it, too,” instead of the more conventional form “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too” — a difference that alerted both investigators and Kaczynski’s family. Despite this, most forensic analysis focuses on subtle differences in writing style that aren’t obvious to the average person. “We aren’t aware of how often we use ‘in’ vs. ‘into’, but different individuals will have slightly different preferences, which can be detected through statistical comparison,” said Shlomo Argamon, forensic linguist at the Illinois Institute of Technology. It was this subtler method that was famously used by Duquesne University text analyst Patrick Juola to confirm J.K. Rowling as the true author of The Cuckoo’s Calling, a novel she wrote under the pen name Robert Galbraith. A program designed by Juola, Java Graphical Authorship Attibution Program, analyzes text for a myriad of subtle clues ranging from word length to sentence construction. As Juola told the National Post, his work “involves analysis of thousands of boring microfeatures like the number of uses of ‘tion’ as a percentage of the document.”
The author can run, but they may not be able to hide
In 1995 the novel Primary Colors, a thinly veiled mockery of the campaign of President Bill Clinton, was released by an author identified only as “Anonymous.” Within months, however, the Washington Post used handwriting analysis on an early manuscript of the book to identify the true author as political columnist Joe Klein. There is no handwriting in this case to examine. The New York Times is also well-known for heavily editing its opinion page, meaning that any tell-tale grammatical errors have already been scrubbed from the text. Nevertheless, just as with a fingerprint, it can still be possible to make a match even from a “contaminated” sample. Argamon said that a linguist would find it relatively easy to remove “consciously chosen features” that the author may have embedded in the text to conceal their identity. “Grammatical editing will also remove some useful features, but some would still remain,” he added. Juola said that the New York Times op-ed would be “harder” to decode than most, but “the science is pretty good right now.” He noted that forensic linguistics is so advanced that it has even been used by Polish linguist Jan Rybicki to find the authors of translated texts. “‘Mere’ editing would not be a showstopper,” he said.
Linguists have cracked tougher cases
Jack Grieve is most well-known for leading a team that identified the author of the Bixby Letter, a famous 1864 letter sent by President Abraham Lincoln to a mother who ostensibly lost five sons in the Civil War (the letter features prominently in the opening of Saving Private Ryan). The letter is only 139 words long, but Grieve’s team was able to use a technique known as “n-gram analysis” to determine with virtual certainty that it was actually written by Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay. Even quotidian sentences can be written a number of different ways. “He’s got a book,” for instance, can also be “he has a book.” “The earth” can be written as “the world.” N-gram analysis is a way of digitally highlighting all these individual tics in order to compare them against existing writings by suspected authors. The more tics that line up, the more analysts are confident in identifying a “suspect.” If an investigator was given enough writing samples from White House staffers, Grieve suspects that it would be possible to zero in on an author using n-gram analysis.
Trust no one
With the release of All the President’s Men in 1974, Washington was left to guess the identity of Deep Throat, an anonymous informant who had provided the Washington Post with clues about the Watergate break-in that helped lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It turned out to be FBI associate director Mark Felt, although Felt fervently denied it at the time. “W. Mark Felt says he isn’t now, nor has he ever been, Deep Throat,” reads the first line of a Wall Street Journal story that asked Felt directly. Primary Colors author Joe Klein, similarly, spent months angrily denying any involvement in the book. “For God’s sake, definitely I didn’t write it,” he once told The New York Times. The moral of these two stories is that no matter how fervent their denial — and no matter how strong the evidence — Washington power players generally cannot be trusted.
• Twitter: TristinHopper | Email: thopper@nationalpost.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment