IP: Correction sought (`Secrets concealed by software' London Times)

[Julian Dibbell]

Ross:

I'm genuinely glad to see you out there fighting the good fight against
wacky anti-stego hysteria. I'm also sorry to see my fellow journalists have
misrepresented what you said to them.

I wish, though, that you hadn't misrepresented *my* writing in the midst of
your response. To wit:

>By February this year, this had been
>been conflated by USA Today, an American popular paper, with an
>earlier FBI briefing on cryptography into a tale that terrorists could
>be using steganography to hide messages [2]. Similar material has
>surfaced in a number of the racier areas of the net [3], despite being
>criticised a number of times by more technically informed writers [4].

I am the author of [3], a 3000-word Feed magazine think piece on the ancient
and recent history of steganography, which merely as a jumping-off point
discusses, for a couple of paragraphs, the USA Today story cited as [2]. The
tone with which I discussed the article was lightly ironic. I was careful
not to endorse the report as fact. And in any case I was far less interested
in whether bin Laden was actually using steganography than in the kind of
cultural responses the idea of stego provokes, both in the national-security
establishment and among anarcho-leaning types like the cypherpunks and, for
that matter, myself.

In short, to refer to my essay and the USA Today freak-out as "similar
material" is just wrong. In fact, my piece is actually more like the one you
imply critiques it, the Declan McCullagh Wired News article cited as [4].
Like my article, Declan's begins by summarizing, but not directly disputing,
the USA Today report. Like mine, it then moves on to a discussion of the
history of steganography and some of its current incarnations. Like mine,
though more thoroughly, it also eventually gets around to reporting the
skepticism of the crypto-savvy toward the USA Today story.

I don't dispute that Declan's a "more technically informed" writer than I
am. And I imagine your implication that his article specifically criticizes
mine is unintentional. But the implication is there all the same, and again,
it's just wrong -- for all the reasons just mentioned and for the additional
reason that Declan's piece came out a couple of weeks before mine did.

Finally, while a lot of us nerdy literary types associated with the
now-defunct Feed might be flattered to think we once worked for one of "the
racier areas of the net," I'm afraid that when the competition is the likes
of HornyTeenSheMalesAndTheirAnimalFriends.com, it would be dishonest to
accept the title.

That said, I do hope the Times runs your letter, footnotes and all.

I just wish I could add a footnote of my own.

Best,
Julian