Declan McCullagh wrote:
The surprising news, according to Johnson and other researchers: Current stego programs don't work well at all. Nearly all leave behind fingerprints that tip off a careful observer that something unusual is going on.
So now the question becomes which stego programs don't leave fingerprints. Should they wish to block stego they might have in mind setting up gateways that twiddle with the low level bits to prevent the message getting through, but that opens up lots of cans of worms for them. This is exceedingly difficult because your router now has to try and detect, recognize, and edit images, sounds, movies and other media on the fly. Of course it will set off signatures if they're used. A user might create a bullshit hotmail account and send a picture to himself then compare the two, etc... so it would have to be done at the legal level, which for us USA folks would bring in freedom of speech issues. For China or Singapore where there's the big firewall, it's not an issue. That leaves only detection open. Which doesn't provide the actual info stored in the stegoed message. Just flags it as "hey this guy is hiding something." Might be enough in some countries to cause the death of the sender and/or receiver. Here, I suppose it's a reason to have them watched closer.
From their point of view, I suspect they'd be worried about stegoed messages leaving from .mil addresses as this would likely indicate the sender is a traitor. i.e. like the Fed that got caught recently spying for the Russians.
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