At 11:47 AM 1/19/01 +0000, Ken Brown wrote:
http://www.spammimic.com/encode.cgi supposedly encodes your short messages as imitation spam, postings designed to fail content filtering & so (the author claims) bypass Echelon. Hmmm. Whoever put the site up doesn't seem to have a clear distinction between cryptography, stenography & obfuscation. Does everyone have to reinvent the wheel every time? Are we going to go through it all *again* with mobile phone text messages?
You're missing the point - it's intended as a steganography system, and like most such, it won't stop somebody who has the same system from destegoing it, but it will stop or substantially reduce the likelihood of Echelon or similar keyword systems from snarfing it. (You could also do a terrorist-mimic version* if you want to _increase_ the chances of Echelon picking it up.) Of course if you need security, you need to stego cyphertext only. The web site probably should emphasize this, but you can always paste in PGP output. (Obviously you'd really want to run the code on your own machine and those of your unindicted co-conspirators, and use custom grammars.) I have a friend who could have really used a program like this a few years ago - he was working in Ethiopia, and he had enough trouble keeping the local kleptocrats from stealing his computers "they don't run without the passwords, so you can't resell them" and the phone company yelled at him for making phone calls in Dutch, which their eavesdroppers couldn't understand; French or Italian or English would have been ok if he wasn't using a local language. We got him a copy of PGP, but he didn't feel safe using it.
It seems to be a version of Peter Wayner's bumf generator from way back when: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/11.71.html#subj2
I think it _was_ Peter Wayner who posted it - this is an implementation of his "mimic functions" paper from some years ago.
(Which has a very funny bit in the style of a Neil Kinnock speech - maybe you have to be in the Labour Party to get it...)
My former Senator, Joe Biden, got caught for plagiarizing Kinnock once - it doesn't take a computer to generate bad speeches :-) Does anybody have a copy of the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert's written a "Pointy-Haired-Boss-Speak" version of this? ~~~~~~~ Semtex Escobar Cocaine Radio Echelon TEMPEST Pablo Assassinate Semtex Semtex W Osama's Radio Directionfinding ~~~~~~ Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639