NHK 'Digital Tattoo' Episode 2: IT Technology & Law

The IT technologies, legal procedures, and investigative methods that appear in the NHK Saturday drama “Digital Tattoo” are, of course, somewhat dramatized and simplified, but they are indeed used in real-world reputational damage control. As the lawyer who was in charge of the original plan, I will explain the investigative method that appears in Episode 2.

The highlight of Episode 2 is probably the scene where YouTuber Taiga identifies the name and address of an anonymous user who posted on a user-registered bulletin board. I will explain this scene.

Identifying Posters Using Online Auction Site IDs

“I’ve figured it out. The person who posted the information about Mr. Ohno being guilty of molestation on the bulletin board.”

“What?”

“Yukari Shibasaki. A housewife. Her address is 2-12-1, Youka-machi, Yuzawa City, Niigata Prefecture.”

(…)

“How did you find out?”

“Through an online auction.”

“What?”

“I tried searching the net with the ID of the person who posted the slander against Mr. Ohno, and found someone using the same ID on @Auction. So, I won the auction for their item, and it just arrived.”

NHK Saturday Drama “Digital Tattoo” Episode 2

The YouTuber, Taiga, conducts an online search for the ID of a user who persistently attacks Mr. Ohno, a client of the protagonist lawyer, Mr. Iwai, on a members-only bulletin board site. He discovers a user on an auction site using the same ID, who is currently listing items for sale. He wins the auction for one of these items, and it arrives from the user, revealing their name and address.

It can be said that there is a high possibility that the sender of the item, who uses the same ID, is the same person who posted the slanderous comments on the bulletin board. Furthermore, within the drama, there is circumstantial evidence that the sender of the item lives in the same town as the victim. The likelihood of them being the same person is quite high.

Case from Yahoo Auction! Listing to Operator Identification

The method of identifying the poster in the aforementioned drama depends on the human personalityistic of “reusing the same ID across different sites”. In reality, there are surprisingly many people who reuse the same ID on different sites, such as shopping sites and bulletin board sites. Of course, when registering as a user, they do not think that they will use this ID to post defamatory comments in the future. Therefore, they register an account with the same ID without caution. If such an ID is used for defamation in the future, there is a possibility that the poster can be identified in a manner similar to the drama.

Furthermore, especially until a little while ago, there was a technical possibility of identification through such investigations in relation to Yahoo!’s services.

Yahoo! operates various services such as browser mail service, website operation service like “Geocities” which has already ended its service, blog service, Chiebukuro, and auction service “Yahoo Auction!”. Once you create an account, it is a site where you can use various services with the same account.

Until a little while ago, it was a de facto standard to use a unified ID across these various services on Yahoo!. However, recently, Yahoo! has been recommending in various ways to change the ID for each service, so there are not many examples of the same ID being reused across multiple services.

When the same ID is “reused” across multiple services in this way, for example,

• The email address listed on the anonymous site is a Yahoo! email address
• If you search for that ID on Yahoo Auction!, there is a reality of being active as a Yahoo Auction! user

There were actually such cases.

In such cases, there is no need to use legal procedures such as the so-called “request for disclosure of sender information” to identify the operator of the anonymous site. Simply by winning an item on Yahoo Auction!, the product is sent from the owner of the ID = the operator of the anonymous site, revealing their address and name.

Similar Methods in the Novel “Digital Tattoo”

This method is also featured in my book “Digital Tattoo”.

Yahoo! is a service with two important features for lawyers dealing with defamation measures.

First, it is a portal service that offers a wide variety of services. This “variety” includes, for example, email services, blog services “Yahoo! Blog”, and auction services “Yahoo! Auctions”.

Another feature is that unless the user deliberately sets it, the user ID of each service is the same. Therefore, for example, if you want to know the operator of a certain Yahoo! Blog where defamation is taking place, you can search for the user ID used in that blog (this is included in the blog’s URL in the form of “http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/dmglace”) in “Yahoo! Auctions”, and you may find items that the operator is listing for auction. If you win the auction for that item, you can learn the name and address of the other party as “seller and successful bidder”.

In this case, I searched for “dmglace” in “Yahoo! Auctions” using the part of the Yahoo! email address before the “@”, and I was able to find a user with the ID “dmglace” in “Yahoo! Auctions”. However, there are currently no listings. It seems that he had been regularly listing items such as car parts for several years, but the last listing was about a year ago.
“Let’s keep an eye on this seller. It’s hard to say why he hasn’t listed anything in the past year, but if he lists something again, we should win the auction.”

(Excerpt)

“Professor, have you really looked at this blog?”
“No, I haven’t really looked at it other than the fact that a Yahoo! email address was written.”
“I thought so. This blog has an interesting article from a little over a year ago. …This is it.”
The blog article stated that he used to enjoy making original car goods such as stickers, but he was going to take a break from his activities because he became busy with work.
I suddenly remembered and looked at the past listing list of “dmglace” on Yahoo! Auctions.
“I see, it’s not just car goods.”
“Yes, these are probably all original products made by this person.”

(Excerpt)

“I don’t know if it will work, but can I try? I’ll email him pretending to be a friend of a buyer of the car goods this person made, and a reader of this blog. I was a fan and was sad when the sales were suspended just when I was thinking of buying, so I’ll ask him to make it again and list it on Yahoo! Auctions.”
I hadn’t thought of that.
“Okay, I’ll leave it to you.”

Book “Digital Tattoo” (slightly revised for posting on this blog)

Lawyers sometimes use detective-like methods to negotiate the removal of content with the operators of anonymous sites.