If my fixer asked me to meet a Johnson at club Ped, i'd probably decline. Besides, given the likelihood of the PCs having cameras in their eyes, it's the Johnson who needs to be worried. That kind of scandal can ruin a corporate suit like him. Shadowrunners, being SINless, have bigger things to worry about.

Now honestly, we all seem a little over paraniod about being taped around here.

We all need to remember that even the most sophisticated data mining program won't be able to go through all the video feeds on the matrix to find YOU. Sure, there's footage of you at the pedo club on the net. Who's Gonna See? You think people just log on and say, "Hey! lets see if Joe shadowrunner is a pedophile today!" And with all the edit program can do, it doesn't amtter if you are really there, if someone wanted to incriminate you, they'd just whip it up with the edit utility.

The end result of all this is Info-swamp. No-one has the time or energy to go through everything. Photos are being doctored all the time, so who cares if you have a picture of Deathcrawler having sex with Jimmy, It's probably fake anyway.

Rely on the sheer amount of data to keep the useful or embarrasing data hidden.

Ah, Security by obscurity. I hate it already.

It isn't security through obscurity so much as security through no one gives a shit.

If no one cares about the information you are putting out then why would it matter?


You know, it is possible that ephebophilia is a legally recognized and protected alternate lifestyle in the future. There is an old and absurd slippery-slope argument that if homosexuals were given equal rights pedophiles would be next. Political correctness taken to extremes can make for good cyberpunk too.

Hyzmarca's got the nail on the head there. It's not that you are safe because no one knows your flaws, it's that you are safe because you aren't worth the effort it would take to go through the data. You are a needle in a haystack, and w/o a SIN to track your data people have to do it the hard way. That's a lot of expenditure of resources.

Lets say you trash a corp project, kill some guards and a scientist, and escape. You caused about 3 million nuyen of damage, all told. Now, you've wiped the corps security footage, but you were also probably caught on who knows how many other sensors, from the weather ballon above to the traffic cameras to the cybereyes of any bystanders. Any one of those could be the key to finding out who you are and tracking you down. However, the security people don't have access to that, and will have to arrange for access. If teh weather ballon belongs to the same megacorp, it might just have to make an interdepartmental memo to get access. To get access to the traffic feeds, they will have to bribe the right people. To get the cameras from the corp facility next door, owned by competitor, they would have to make some terse negotiations. To get the images form random bystanders would require tracking them down, THEN negotiating. Negotiations cost money, both in actual payment and in paying the negotiator his fee. Then you have to go through the footage. This costs money. You have to pay people to do the job, and it will take time. Then they have to store the data (Money) coallate the data (Money), determine the proper response to the data (Money) and finally, track you down and kill you (Other runners, corp guards on hazard pay, Money, money , money.)

So the equation here is (What it's worth to the corp to get you) vs. (what it will take to find you.) You can't make yourself unfindable, you just have to make sure it's always more trouble to find you than it's worth. You can't be invulnerable (they can always thor shot you.) You just have to be more troube to take down than it's worth.
This means covering your ass, yes, it also menas not being too much trouble. Just keep the equation balanced in your favor and you'll be good.

Actually, the random bystanders would probably be the easiest to get the pictures from. Just take a look at your logs for what commlinks were in the area, and send them messages asking for the data (and a minor payment if they deliver).

But the thing is that it doesn't pay for corps to go after Shadowrunners except in the first few minutes of a datasteal before a drop can be made. After that it is a complete waste of resources. It would be like killing doctors to stop abortions, killing assassins to stop assasinations, killing drug dealers to stop drugs from being sold, or killing carpet cleaners to stop carpets from being cleaned. Shadowrunners are deregulated service providers and like all service providers in deregulated industries they have competetion. If one fails the Johnson can always choose another. Since the Johnson is usually an extraterritorial corp, they can't just go after it through the runners.