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.) From the "U.S.A. Today" article, I believe _someone_ has been reading my articles from back then. They even refer to this stego use as "digital dead drops," a term I was using almost 10 years ago. (It was utterly obvious to me, and perhaps to others, that the old dead drop of depositing written messages in Coke cans and leaving them at the base of oak trees was too low tech to take seriously. The bandwidth of the Net, and the vast number of places to tuck information unobtrusively, made it an obvious place for dead drops.) And, as a matter of fact, when I was looking into this kind of stuff, there were already reports that a Mafia guy on the run was using the bulletin boards of the time to communicate with his wife and perhaps other associtates. He would log in to an obscure BBS or chat room of the day (I think it was on Compuserve) and leave simply-coded messages. A digital dead drop. --Tim May --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns