Media Security Protection: New Methodology For Authorship Examination Of The Internet Discourse

Abstract

This article deals with the issues of forensic authorship examination of Internet discourse texts to ensure media security. The existing forensic authorship examination methods are either not suitable for identification and diagnostic tasks, or need to be updated and improved, since modern communication in the Internet environment has new properties that are different from the properties of purely oral / written speech. Authors try to reveal specific mixed nature of this new type of forensic objects (a combination of oral and written speech) and propose new approaches to identification and diagnostic authorship examination of Internet speech products. The most rational approach to develop methodology for Internet discourse authorship examination is, according to the authors’ opinion, to combine the methods of identifying the speaker based on oral speech (in terms of linguistic analysis in framework of “Dialect” technique) and written speech (methods proposed by Vul and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia). The article serves as a basis for the future research in the sphere of forensic authorship examination of the internet discourse and forensic speech science in general. The authors conclude that it is necessary to improve / develop not only authorship identification methods but authorship diagnostic methods which allow one to determine properties of a questioned text and/or properties of an author’s idiostyle, electronic communication skills, etc. that is needed to determine author’s social and demographical characteristics.