stego for the censored II

[Tim May]

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 at 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