>On October 10, there has been press reports that a UK company, >iomart, has unearthed coded messages on the Internet which may be >linked to Osama bin Laden.
The Register has a very skeptical take on this story: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/22154.html The last paragraph sums up the article: "But of course the proof, if it exists, has got to be classified, so we can't actually evaluate it independently. Funny that." The steganography horseman has been all over in the past few weeks, most recently in the US for an unprecedented agreement of the US media to not broadcast the full content of messages from bin Laden, because they may contain hidden messages: At worst, the broadcasts could contain signals to ``sleeper'' agents, [White House spokesman Ari Fleischer] added. ``The concern here is not allowing terrorists to receive what might be a message from Osama bin Laden calling on them to take any actions.'' http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011010/us/attacks_hidden_message_5.html I find it troubling that a deeply-held cornerstone of our country, the free and independent press, has been compromised by ignorant conceptions of "possible hidden messages". The real reason for this agreement seems to be to deprive bin Laden of a propaganda channel, which at least makes some sense, but they put up the steganography smokescreen. ObCryptography - are there any good documented cases of mathematical steganography actually being used? I can't think of anything in David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" beyond low-tech stuff like secret inks, etc. Plenty of research into covert channels, but where has a mathematically based stego system actually been used? [EMAIL PROTECTED] . . . . . . . . http://www.media.mit.edu/~nelson/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
