The Haystack application aims to use steganography to hide samizdat-type data within a larger stream of innocuous network traffic. Thus, civilians in Iran, for example, could more easily evade Iranian censors and provide the world with an unfiltered report on events within the country. Haystack earned its creator Austin Heap a great deal of positive coverage from the media during the 2009 Iranian election protests. The BBC described Heap as "on the front lines" of the protesters' "Twitter revolution", while The Guardian called him an Innovator of the Year. Despite the laudatory coverage, however, the media were never given a copy of the software to examine. Indeed, not much is known about the software or its inner workings. Specialists in network encryption security were not allowed to perform an independent evaluation of Haystack, despite its distribution to and use by a small number of Iranians, possibly at some risk. As interest in the project widens and criticisms of the media coverage and software continue to mount, Heap has currently asked users to cease using Haystack until a security review can be performed.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Sep 13, 2010 - 31 comments

The US Department of Justice has announced arrests in four states of ten alleged members of a “deep-cover” Russian spy ring whose ultimate goal was apparently to infiltrate U.S. policy-making circles. So much for burger diplomacy? [more inside]
posted by zarq on Jun 28, 2010 - 70 comments

The investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks (dubbed "Amerithrax" by the FBI) is now closed. Yesterday, the Department of Justice released a 92-page summary [pdf] of their investigation. Their conclusion -- that USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins was the culprit -- was backed by an impressive amount of evidence, including microbiological detective work (p. 23 ff). But some of the investigation was downright bizarre.... [more inside]
posted by cgs06 on Feb 20, 2010 - 46 comments

The Histogram As The Image. An interesting (but probably mostly useless) spin on steganography.
posted by melorama on Sep 30, 2007 - 20 comments

SecurityFocus is talking about Niels Provos, a graduate student well known for his work in steganography and for creating the honeyd program, having to move his research for his PhD from his U of Michigan homepage to a server in the Netherlands and keep U.S. citizens from viewing the information. Why? Because the state of Michigan passed their version of DMCA. I can see the routers and firewall software piling up in the trash.
posted by memnock on Apr 15, 2003 - 10 comments

Messaging ogling Google lobby [clip] "At Google's headquarters off Highway 101 in Mountain View, visitors sit in the lobby, transfixed by the words scrolling by on the wall:" [/endclip] [clip] So anyway... I thought to actually *message* the viewers with - I hope you Google-ites get a good kick out of searches! - no quotes. [/endclip] Results? Do it, Me-Fi! The link is to the full post at Topica.
posted by Grand Wahzoo on Jan 5, 2003 - 21 comments

Terrist messages in digital photographs questioned (salon.com). Last week, USA Today raised a stir by claiming that terrorists were trading hidden messages in images on ebay by the "hundreds" using an uncited source. Salon contacting other sources willing to go on the record found that finding hundreds of hidden messages requires sampling more files than were posted to ebay in the past year. In addition steganography analysis turns up a high rate of false-positivies. Is this a case of seeing what we want to see like the Bacon-Shakespeare ciphers?
posted by KirkJobSluder on Jul 18, 2002 - 18 comments

A University of Michigan study has concluded that terrorists were not using hidden messages embedded in eBay auction images to plan the attacks. However, speculation that Ritz cracker advertisements were used has not yet been refuted.
posted by jjg on Sep 26, 2001 - 5 comments