Yet more stego scare in the New York Times

[Nelson Minar]

Another sensationalist article in the NYT about the pervasiveness of
steganography, with yet another lack of any evaluatable information.
  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/30/science/physical/30STEG.html?pagewanted=print

In summary, evidence for stego in this article is:

Some unnamed French defense ministry official says the folks they
arrested for the plot to blow up the US embassy in Paris were using
stego.

Chet Hosmer, president & CEO of WetStone Technologies, claims that
0.6% of images he found on porno sites and eBay have stego. He won't
tell anyone which images or how he found them, and he can't read the
secret messages. Oh, but he's paid by the Air Force.

There are a bunch of stego tools available on the Internet, "with over
a million downloads!" (Nevermind that most of those tools are the
equivalent of ROT-13).


The article does get better, quoting a few researchers back and forth,
and finally getting to Provos' work analyzing images and finding
nothing.

What's so frustrating about this is that it is quite possible that
high quality stego is being used out there; how would we know? But in
the absence of facts, the media picks up the most scary sounding info
and leads with it. I normally write letters to newspapers when I read
dumb stories like this (and sometimes they publish them!), but I don't
even know what to say this time.


                                                     nelson at monkey.org
.       .      .     .    .   .  . . http://www.media.mit.edu/~nelson/



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