Stegotext in usenet as offsite backup

[Ray Dillinger]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2001 georgemw at speakeasy.net wrote:

>If it's a crime to take actions specifically for the purpose of later
>rendering you unable to comply with a judge's order (is it?),
>how is escrowing it on the isle of man any different?

Oddly, I've been watching this one with some interest. 
The other day I got worried about potential disk drive 
crashes, since with one thing and another I'm starting 
to accumulate a lot of unreleased original source code 
on my main machine. After the work I've put into it, 
I'd hate to lose it.  But it's not an application that 
does anything useful yet.

It would be handy, from my point of view, to use usenet as 
an "offsite backup" solution -- posting encrypted source 
for work-in-progress on binary newsgroups so I could just 
go back and nab it out of the archives if I ever have a 
disk crash or in case the computer gets stolen.

If I want to increase the odds of its getting archived, I 
would just embed it in a sound file or a movie file using 
stego (original sound and movies, so as to avoid DMCA 
hassles, of course). 

Stegograms present an interesting copyright question for 
the legally inclined; if I'm using usenet archives as offsite 
backup via stegograms, I'm okay with the release and public 
use of the stegogram, which most folks will interpret as 
being the same as the covertext.  But would that entangle 
the copyright on the stegotext as well?  Or if somebody took 
the stegogram and figured it out, would I have legal recourse
to stop them from doing anything with my code?

(I was considering going to a lawyer with this one, but 
since the odds against anyone hacking the password on the 
encrypted data in the stegotext are literally astronomical, 
I figure the point is sufficiently moot to be not worth 
answering except as an intellectual curiosity.)

			Bear