Interesting. But my main concern was the anti-stego software. I can't
see how it relates much to child porn (you can't hide a typical GIF or
JPEG inside another one - it takes huge amounts of data in which to
hide little amounts of other data that way). It seems to me that the
anti-stego tools are being developed for completely different purposes,
such as to detect short stego'd messages (on any topic) in e-mail file
attachments. All this "pedophiles" hooplah smells like a handwave to
me.
That, and the lack of any evidence so far that these tools will be used
in compliance with legally authorized investigation procedures, or any
way for the public to oversee police use of such technologies.
At 4:26 PM -0700 on 8/11/00, Kerry L. Bonin wrote:
>>Any of these could raise some obvious concerns. I'm curious if anyone
>>might have a clear idea what "image matching software" is, and whether
>>"steganography detection software" is even feasible and what one might
>>do to defeat it. The others are fairly obivious in both intent and
>>viability.
>
> I've been thinking about this issues for some time and have an idea what
> they may be referring to. Politics and ethics aside, here's a technical
> concept:
>
> Reading about other child porn busts like Innocent Images and some info on
> the workings of these groups, it appears that "bona fides" are sometimes
> established between pedophiles through submission of personal collections
> of child porn. One data point that stuck in my mind about this was a
> "club" that required submission of 10k! images as the price of admission.
>
> Assuming the body of child porn in circulation is of some reasonable size,
> and grows far less rapidly than adult porn, it should be feasible to
> construct a "fingerprint" style database by scanning the collections the
> FBI (and some postmasters) are known to have in their posession.
>
> An automated tool could then conceivably be created in conjunction with a
> statefull inspection firewall or statefull passive line tap to recognize
> when significant quantities of registered porn are being transmitted.
>
> The obvious counter for this would be encryption or steganography, which
> was also mentioned.
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