<nettime> "Pirate Utopia," FEED, February 20, 2001

Adam Back adam at cypherspace.org
Fri Sep 21 13:19:43 EDT 2001


My point was higher level.  These systems are either already broken or
fragile and very lightly peer reviewed.  There aren't many people
building and breaking them.

I did read the papers; my summary is the above, and from that I
surmise it would not be wise for a terrorist to use current generation
steganography systems.

Probably more likely would be the other posters comment that they
would use pre-arranged manually obscured meaning in inoccuous email,
which if done with low enough bandwidth is probably pretty damn
robust and secure.

However unlike the other poster, I don't consider this stego in the
sense of the news report being discussed -- they are talking up the
idea of banning anonymity and steganography software -- where-as in
reality the software is not being used, doesn't make sense to use due
to the current state of the art.  The lobbying by the signals
intelligence community is mis-characterizing the technical reality to
further their own special interest which is easy to do as both the
public and the media are easy to manipulate as they have even less
understanding of anonymity and steganography than they do of
confidentiality.

Adam

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 03:10:05AM +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> No, Provos' own system, Outguess, www.outguess.org, is secure in the
> latest version.  At least, he can't break it.  It remains to be seen
> whether anyone else can.  See the papers on that site.



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