Terrorists, Steganography, and False Alarms
Bruce Schneier blogs that the worries about terrorists hiding messages in things such as images, documents, and television broadcasts are false alarms.
The first sign that something was amiss came a few days before Christmas Eve 2003. The US department of homeland security raised the national terror alert level to "high risk". The move triggered a ripple of concern throughout the airline industry and nearly 30 flights were grounded, including long hauls between Paris and Los Angeles and subsequently London and Washington.
But in recent weeks, US officials have made a startling admission: the key intelligence that prompted the security alert was seriously flawed. CIA analysts believed they had detected hidden terrorist messages in al-Jazeera television broadcasts that identified flights and buildings as targets. In fact, what they had seen were the equivalent of faces in clouds - random patterns all too easily over-interpreted.
[Schneier]
It's a signal-to-noise issue. If you look at enough noise, you're going to find signal just by random chance. It's only signal that rises above random chance that's valuable.
And the whole notion of terrorists using steganography to embed secret messages was ludicrous from the beginning. It makes no sense to communicate with terrorist cells this way, given the wide variety of more efficient anonymous communications channels.
I first wrote about this in September of 2001.
I have to agree, there are many more efficient ways of communicating this information. Even in a
presentation Elonka gave at Defcon in 2002 showed that, yes there was a threat but no evidence could actually link the threat to a single act or usage of steganography for terrorist activities. (Although she got quite a
bit of traction out of this presentation giving it at 20 different places between 2002-2003. That being said, I liked the presentation, especially the usage of stego to embed a secret message within the presentation.)
I need a fringe topic like this to associate with current high profile issues of the day so I can get on the speaking circuit more often.
Posted by volubis at August 17, 2005 10:35 AM
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