iomart, steganography, pornography, Usama bin Laden ...

[Ian Miller]

>http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_419821.html
>
>All I can say, being not qualified to comment on the issues, is "!" ...
>
It is entirely possible that they have found "the embedded messages [which]
were quotes from the Koran and suchlike" of which Peter Fairbrother wrote.
There are plenty of innocent or at worst mischievous uses for
steganography.  However such uses are likely to use
this-message-isn't-obvious stego.  A terrorist is far more likely to be
using this-message-is-as-undetectable-as-possible stego.  The former will
clearly be far easier to detect than the latter, and probably far more
common; mischievous geeks being considerably more common than terrorists.
Accordingly the vast majority, if not all, stego messages discovered are
likely to be innocent.

However the strongest reason for thinking that no terrorist messages have
been found is the very fact that these discoveries have been made public.
If the intelligence services had found a clandestine means of communication
being used by the terrorists, it would criminally irresponsible to allow
this to be made public.  If real terrorists communications had been found,
I hope and trust that a D notice would have been issued.

Personally I doubt that even sensibly written home-grown stego. is
detectable.  As a test I have written some of the same and put up a
challenge to detect which of a collection of images contain hide messages.
The challenge is at
<http://www.singularis.ltd.uk/stegano/stegano.html>

Ian

--
Singularis Ltd, 32 Stockwell St, Cambridge, CB1 3ND
Ian_Miller@singularis.ltd.uk
Tel:  +44 1223 525088	            Mobile: +44 777 5536663
Fax:  +44 870 1640519 (e-mail preferred to Fax)