The New York Times, CyberTimes <http://www.nytimes.com> September 5, 1997 Behind Encryption Debate: Using a Mimicry Applet By PETER WAYNER What is the true meaning of a message? This is the question that Louis J. Freeh, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, would like every Internet service provider to start wondering. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Related Article Encryption Tops Wide-Ranging Net Agenda in Congress (September 4, 1997) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In testimony before a Senate subcommittee on Wednesday, Freeh suggested that the companies carrying the e-mail of the country should be able to provide a way "for the immediate, lawful decryption of the communications or the electronic information once that information is found by a judgeto be in furtherance of a criminal activity or a national security matter." The only problem is that data is so easy to mutate that it is hard to determine what is the true message. Even after discounting the jokes about the doublespeak of politicians or the beautiful lies that lovers spin to seduce, there are deeper questions of whether it is ever possible to find the correct message in data. This applet shows how data can be mutated into innocent-sounding plaintext with the push of a button. In this case, the destination is a voiceover from a hypothetical baseball game between teams named the Blogs and the Whappers. The information is encoded by choosing the words, the players and the action in the game. In some cases, one message will lead to a string of homeruns, and in other cases a different message will strike out three players in a row. See the FAQ for more information. The applet takes a few minutes to load. When it is ready, you'll see three text-input windows. The first window is where you type the message that you want the applet to encode. The second, larger window is where the mimicry-encoded message appears. Mimicry can be reversed by pushing the second button. The output is replicated at the bottom. Remember that any error in the text can mess up the result. There are plenty of limitations to this system. It only sends uppercase letters and spaces. Lowercase letters are converted to uppercase, and anything else is converted into a space. How do I use to send "innocent" messages? Type your message into the top window, push the first button and then cut the blather out of the second box. Most of the new browsers will let you do this, but some older browsers don't have this capability. Upgrade to Netscape Communicator 4.0 or Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 for this feature. To unscramble the "innocent" message, the receiver needs to call up this page and paste your message into the second box and then push the second button. The hidden message will appear in the bottom window.