At 09:05 AM 2/7/01 -0800, Tim May wrote:
At 10:25 AM +0100 2/7/01, Tom wrote:
damn, it seems someone already did what I proposed a while ago under the thread "stego for the censored". if anyone in here has contacts to these terrorists, can you ask them for the software, please? maybe they want to GPL it so we can use it for other purposes as well? :)
Not that I want to claim credit for this use by terrorists, but you will find that I wrote about this precise use in the late 80s. The Kevin Kelly book, "Out of Control," had a long description of this kind of use, based on interviews he did with me in 1992.
And, of course, in 1992 there were numerous posts on this in Cypherpunks, by me and by others. The Apple consultant Romana Machado took these discussions and generated a little program she called "Stego," which put simple messages into GIF files. At least a couple of other stego programs were in use around this time, too. (This was circa 1993.)
I know this has been mentioned before, but it seems to me that we should make use of all the great CRM watermarking technologies being developed. One of the primary goals of such technology is to hide the watermark in such a way that it cannot be isolated from the source material or removed by copying or filtering without making reproduction of the source material unacceptably degraded. At MacCrypto BlueSpike http://www.bluespike.com/ gave an good talk on this and my mind has been considering the stego uses of CRM ever since. To the degree such technologies deliver on these aspects of their CRM mandate they may serve the needs of clandestine communications. steve