So I've seen a lot run ideas and such, in books and other places, that mention having the runners go off and get some kind of evidence to blackmail someone or prove innocence/guilt but none of them seem to specify what exactly they'd be finding. In 2070, what kind of physical, protable evidence could you possibly find that would be convincing? Let alone digital evidence. How could you hack into a computer or whatever and find something compelling?

I mean even today, you can easily forge images, video and even sound/voice. I can only imagine that it would be ridiculously easy in 2070, you wouldn't be able to trust any picture or video. Any typed document or any digital file of any kind would seem to be extremely easy to forge as well. So what exactly could someone find in the way of evidence or blackmail material?

Even today I think it isnt as much as the evidence itself as much as the potential publicy damage that could be done with said materials. In various source books it is written that video and sound recording are still being used to blackmail people the world over.
One example is from the old UCAS source book where in the shadowtalk it reads "...video taping Japanese executives in the board room enjoying themselves with underaged elven girls."
Also documented money transfers with printouts or copies of the number of accounts being used.
Just look at the damage the Wikileaks' case has done already. Just think if all that material were being used as leverage towards policians and their ilk.
What about medical records showing conditions not in the corporate personal files? I think it is in "The Net" were a congressman commits suicide over a forged medical record showing he has aids.

Use the material to put pressure on people, not companies, and you can get far ^^

So the canon idea is just to turn a blind eye to the unrealism, in favor of helping the setting/having fun? In the same way that people who run the numbers can't really come up with a good justification for there being enough native americans left to take over a significant portion of the United States? I'm not trying to be rude, i understand that that sort of thing is necessary sometimes.

The bit about using it to target specific people seems logical. Because a company would have the resources to disprove it, would be less likely to freak out (due to having multiple people involved in the decision making and such) and would be able to strike back against the blackmailer. A person would be likely to just get worried and obey out of fear, especially a person who isn't a criminal.

Also the bit about bank accounts makes sense. If it was verifiable in some kind of trusted electronic system, then that could still be very damaging.

So in order to blackmail someone, you just hope that they either care more about their image than they do about whatever you're blackmailing them about, or that they are not intelligent enough to realize that your evidence could be denied?

Furthermore, to that effect, it seems like simply creating evidence would be much simpler/cheaper than paying shadowrunners to go get it. I mean, if you need some incriminating stuff and you don't care if it's real or not, why not just pay some hacker or whatever to make it up from scratch? Considering that that would be reasonably possible in the present, I would assume it would be a hundred times easier 60 years in the future.

The main thing about blackmail is, the person you are blackmailing should believe that you know something about him, he doesn't want to have find out. But the second part is you should also make him believe that you have proof.

So, creating evidence for Blackmail only works if you actually already have the knowledge to blackmail him.


As in, you can make a movie about Brackhaven having sex with underage elven girls, but if he never had sex with underage elven girls, then that will be laughed off and probably gets you arrested.

An executive is laundering money. But when you don't know which back accounts he's using, or how he's doing it. No amount of forgery is actually going to upset him. Unless of course you're exactly right.

The whole problem with blackmail and forging your evidence is ... you don't use that evidence ... it's a prop. But you better be damn right about your facts when you try to blackmail someone.

To use a metaphor. Faking blackmail is like faking smoke. That only works if you put it where the one you are blackmailing knows his flammables are stored.

I disagree. You can create false blackmail material (and get away with it).

The variables are:
How convincing the evidence is
How damaging it is
How hard it is to reproduce

All of those must be 'high' to make the material worthwhile. If I'm your system admin and I 'happen' to find documents indicating that you're selling corp secrets to the enemy, you probably want to pay me off because, even if false, it would cause serious harm to your rep, and you can be fairly confident the only person you'll be paying off for this 'secret' is me. If it's a photoshopped video though, you do not want to pay out, because anyone can make photoshopped videos, so eventually you'll run out of money and get 'hit' anyway.

This doesn't have to be unrealistic, although it's a lot easier if it is. You just need access to inside information (even if you are creating your blackmail, you need privileged access).

Well, it also depends who is the "arbiter" that judges the evidence, and the nature of the evidence. UCAS law prohibits magical interrogation, but I don't think the Yakuza does, so blackmailing soneone for cheating the Yakuza is easier, in a sense (but also generally risky, because, Yakuza.)

It rather depends on how important the matter is. On a minor matter, like evidence of petty theft, a good forgery will probably work out, since the amount of effort put into examining evidence is tied to how important the case is.

Another factor is how badly people want to believe the evidence is true. Proof that a hated minority is responsible for crimes is perhaps accepted at face value by racist authorities.

Traditional Photography has returned in a new way, due to the "Unreliable" nature of Digital Pictures/Video. It's a lot easier to prove that a negative has been doctored than it is a digital file. Or easier to prove that it's original, not sure which.

CSIs in Shadowrun uses SLR cameras to take pictures of crime scenes, for example. I think it was Vice that explained this, but it might have been Arsenal.

As for other forms of evidence... Depends on the person/country/culture in question. Having an Ancestor Spirit spill your dirty laundry for dishonoring the family will do a lot of damage in some places, while in others the people will just saw that "The spirit was a hand puppet for the magician who summoned it."

Trying to expose someone in France for having a Mistress won't get you very much, but one in D.C. (Especially if he's running on the "Family Values" ticket) will get his hide nailed to the wall.

And then there was the President that was fisting kittens... Oh, wait, wrong universe. Sorry.

I recall that Shadowbeat had info on how to fake footage and doctor photos, if not create them wholesale. THere was a whole section that was basically "It's true: everyone does it. But if you get caught, your career is finished." It's never quite foolproof, is the thing: it can be made almost foolproof, but a good enough forensic investigator runs a chance of uncovering the faker. There's an implication in the good ol' Street Samurai Catalog - and continued, I believe, in Fields of Fire - that The Neon Samurai was framed by Ares for killing his father, because his father had some ideas stolen from him by his former corporate masters. Alternately, you can read the section as The Neon Samurai probably DID kill his father in a drunken rage.

Point is, yeah: blackmail is probably often faked. But here's the thing about blackmail: sometimes it can hurt you anyway. There are three basic situations where this can play out, with several subsets:

1) The blackmail info is totally bogus, and won't pan out. have doctored data logs of a corporate manager stealing data and selling it to a rival. Except during the time-date-stamp for the logs, the corporate manager wasn't in the system, and has people and sources able to coroborate that. Maybe he was at a company morale event. Maybe there's video footage of him shopping with his daughter. Maybe he'd been pulled off of that project and lost access the week before. The point is, that kind of blackmail won't stick, because it's pretty obviously bogus.
ALTERNATELY: It's true, but it doesn't *matter*. I have video of Miles Lanier doing a thai ladyboy of a tender age. Does Miles Lanier care? Probably not. He's untouchable by scum like me, and/or his corporate masters won't care if he does transvestites in the bathroom of a Texaco, as long as the bottom line is still good and he does his job. If I had video of him contributing to a security breach, maybe that would be different, but this kind of blackmail just doesn't work on him, cuz his bosses don't care.

2) The blackmail info is totally bogus, but it doesn't matter since it'll cause a scandal anyway. I expect - personally, I mean - that this is the most common kind of "blackmail" used to keep government officials in line. Probably not the most common period, because I assume everyone in Shadowrun is corrupt to *some* degree, but this is probably the easiest to manhandle elected officials with. Suppose for a moment I have faked blackmail video of Senator So-and-So using racially insensitive terms behind closed doors. It won't matter that it's not true, because as soon as that kind of shit gets out, all them Orks and Trolls and whatnot will sour to him, and he'll start bleeding votes. This is a lot like John Kerry's political campaign: despite the fact that the allegations of the individuals who founded Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were proven false, and (often) later recanted by the very people who made them, the effort was immensely damaging to Kerry's political campaign. In this case, it doesn't matter how real or fake the evidence is, as long as people believe it.
ALTERNATELY: The blackmail info has been deliberately planted, to mislead investigators into biting into a lie. Witness what happened to Dan Rather's credibility when CBS pubished the "awol report" on George W. Bush's military service. Because of how easy it was to disprove as being real, Rather's credibility never recovered, he was pushed into early retirement, and it insulated Bush against further investigations into his military service records. A good plan, if you can make people buy it.
ALTERNATELY: The blackmail info is bogus, but people will corroborate it: Maybe I have faked data suggesting Middle Manager Mark has been embezzling company funds. He'll laugh at me, until I show him video of his wife confessing, tearfully, that she knew but was too afraid of him to do anything. Some of his friends have also said he's been acting funny. And look... there's a new car with his name on it down the street. In this case, even though it's massively faked, it won't matter: the preponderance of faked evidence is enough to push his ass into line. Ironically, this is where being under the corporate spyglass comes in handy: a hostile member of a foreign corp won't be able to reasonably pull this off, since Mark's parent corp will have tons of info that it's a set-up. But he'll have to watch out for hostilities from within his parent corp: the strongest competition for given resources in any environment comes from the same group.

3) The blackmail info is real, and can be corroborated. Well, would you look at that? Sherman Huang *did* steal that data from Inazo Aneki's corpse, and shoot him in the head. Despite the fact that he's now President of Renraku America, if we have video of him shooting Aneki, we can strong-arm him. It's a dangerous gambit, but he'll probably respond. Why? First, the no matter how closely someone scrutinizes that video, it'll never be proven to be faked, because it's not. Second, if anyone analyzes the source code that Huang released, they'll discover it's too similar to Aneki's code to be a co-incidence, which only reinforces the video's authenticity. Third, even if he thinks he's immune to this shit from the rest of the board... there's some subordinate in Renraku America that wants his job, and will use this to damage him SOMEHOW.

Effective, real blackmail *never* exists in a vaccuum. That's the thing. There's always at least *some* amount of coroboration if you know where to look. Often, blackmail is just that: a hint as to where to start digging for the proverbial bodies.

Very nicely done Adarael.

okay so a common thing to mention seems to be that it doesn't matter if it's real or not, because it can still be damaging to reputations. So first of all, that means it's a lot less likely someone will hire shadowrunners to steal/uncover something unless they don't know what they're looking for in the first place. Because real evidence will still be better I guess. However, I have an issue with just how damaging it would be. I think right now, as the concept of digital manipulation is still fairly new, people still believe most the pictures and videos and such that they see, unless they're glaringly false/unreal. However, in 2070 I would think that digital manipulation would be so powerful and widespread that basically everyone would know better than to trust a simple picture and would be more likely to discard it.

So, in my theory, a politician gets some dirty pictures of himself released. People who already hate him believe them and hate him more. Everyone else says "Well, there's no reason to believe this at all, because it's just a digital picture, therefore I'll not even consider it." I know that sounds like I'm assuming a lot of intelligence in the average voter, which is clearly not true. However, in truth I'm assuming that such a feeling would be so ingrained that even stupid people have it. If you took a modern sci-fi film back to the 1920s or whenever film was just invented, people would not be able to tell it was false, they'd probably believe you had actual footage of aliens. If you show that same film to any ten year old or reasonably stupid person from the present, they'd immediately tell you that it's just a movie. My theory is that this "it's just a movie" feeling would extend to all forms of digital information in 2070, because of how prevalent/powerful digital manipulation is.

However, I will say that I do like the idea of corroboration. Blackmail information that is backed up by real events (like buying a new car) does make a lot of sense.

Also I apologize for any bad grammar, or if my whole post doesn't even make sense or something, I'm a bit sleepy at the moment.

I definitely think there's something to that, but I also think there's something to the fact that people are total idiots a lot of the time. Especially in Shadowrun, where it's overtly stated that they're indoctrinated from a young age to believe whatever Daddy Corp tells them to. People, in this case, refers to corporate citizens and wageslaves; SINless don't matter, for purposes of votes or getting things done in the "real" world.

You can really see how retarded people are when it comes to, say, juries. I risk opening up a poltically charged discussion here, but in cases such as the OJ Simpson trial, the Randall Dale Adams trial (look up the film "The Thin Blue Line" if you like), Juan Roberto Melendez-Colon... the list goes on and on. In cases where authority figures are speaking, the average citizen can be lead to believe all kinds of insane shit despite a lack of evidence, or alternately brought to believe something against all credible evidence, simply because of natural human charisma and persuasiveness. We, as individuals, have a natural tendancy to believe ourselves to be credible people, capable of rational analysis - and to some extent that's true. Left to our own devices, we will draw (generally) rational conclusions. Given the presence of creative editing and authority figures, however, we will often just get swept along for the ride. Check out Solomon E. Asch's psych experiments for the most basic example of this kind of thing.

We think we're canny people. We think we know things, and can make informed decisions. But I hold up "Loose Change" - the film on the purported "truth" of 9/11 - as a counter-example. Ordinarily intelligent friends of mine believed *every word* of it, merely because it sounded credible. They logically know our government is incredibly porous, and that it can't find its own ass with a map, and that the idea the vast conspiracy required for Loose Change's thesis to be true is so massively improbable as to be effectively impossible... but they overlook that logic because it *sounds* plausible.

There's also been, in recent years, a growing trend of the opposite result: people refusing to believe very ordinary photographs and video because they've "obviously" been faked.

Edit to add: To reiterate, I think you have a point. I think a *lot* of people in 2072 are going to be canny enough not to believe some bullshit faked "evidence". Unfortunately, I think most of those people won't matter, because they'll be SINless. And I think another large block of them won't actively care, as long as they get their paid time off, their quarterly 500 yen bonus, and a discount at StufferShack. Because the corps want to brainwash people into being obedient, and 9 out of 10 times, they'll be doing the blackmailing.

All you need is a bit more manufactured corroborating evidence.

Faked video logs? All right. Even better if you can take sound bytes from the actual video and rearrange them to fit your context and not theirs. Spoof in a deposit to the guy's account, then send it back on to an untraceable that you can throw away; just so the record has it. Buy a car for a streetwalker contact of yours as a 'gift', use the funds you transferred into his account before sending them on - and then people will start to believe the hype while he's protesting loudly.

People can be canny, but it just means you slap them from a direction they don't expect.