steganographic trick

[Gary Howland]

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> Imagine you're an FBI agent or something like that.  You've been assigned
> to investigate some guy, to include sniffing out any data he may have
> stored in encrypted format to keep private.
> 
> You de-crypt the data from some elaborate stego scheme, and find - a
> recipe for chocolate cookies.

It's funny you should joke about this.  A good friend of mine was under
serious investigation for a crime which he was not involved with, simply
because he fitted a profile.  His house was raided and he was under
surveillance on and off for 9 months.  During the house raid the cops
took away a "suspicious" disk (containing an encrypted (although not PGP)
file).  During the 9 months he was sometimes "tailed" by up to 6 cars,
and they had fitted a radio locator to his car.  They spent nearly
$500,000 investigating him, and also blew their local computer budget
trying to crack the encrypted disk.

He knows all of this information since he became friends with the
investigating officer after it became clear that my friend was innocent.
After my friend was told about their efforts to crack the disk, he showed
the investiagting officer what the encrypted file was - a .gif of Mickey Mouse!

(Note to skeptics - this is no UL - this was a good friend of mine)

Gary
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pub  1024/C001D00D 1996/01/22  Gary Howland <gary at kampai.euronet.nl>
Key fingerprint =  0C FB 60 61 4D 3B 24 7D  1C 89 1D BE 1F EE 09 06 

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