The government figured out sockpuppet managment but not "persona management".

[backscatter712]

210. I think they are gaming the juries.

My bet is that it's been scripted into the persona-management software. They have to age their socks, otherwise they're too obvious. MIRT whacks the Beavis-and-Butthead trolls with a post count of two quite efficiently. To be a plausible persona, you've got to have a few thousand posts under your belt.

One thing you can do is post stuff in the Cooking forum or some other forum where nobody goes. That does eventually get trackable though.

You can also build a library of innocuous post material, with stuff like "K&R!" "He's my President!" "Awesome post!", and sprinkle them in threads as appropriate.

I'm thinking it's a mix of techniques used to automate the process, age their socks, make them appear to have at least superficial personalities, and do it in enough volume that they have several dozen socks to swarm a thread when a story like the Snowden story comes along and threatens the power-elites that write the checks.

On juries:

One thing you can do is have the persona-management software refresh threads and refresh forum index pages over and over, periodically, with a bit of randomness to simulate a human surfing DU, and screen-scrape the results for "You've been selected to serve on a jury."

Voila - not only are you aging your sock, but now you got on a jury, you've automated the process to maximize your odds of being on a jury, you're probably doing this with a hundred socks all at once, so you've multiplied your chances of getting on a jury by a hundred-fold, now you can use the juries as a weapon against those bitching about the sockpuppeting, trolling and propagandizing.

Because don't you know, troll-hunters make DU suck! :-p