From: Jim McCoy <mccoy@communities.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 1996 00:26:46 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Why is cryptoanarchy irreversible?
In-Reply-To: <v02140b07aea84b33c6fd@[192.0.2.1]>
Message-ID: <v03007804aea89bd39b78@[205.162.51.35]>
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Peter Hendrickson writes:
[...]
>> Get a warrant, search my system, find nothing but a bunch of applications
>> and a collection of risque (but definitely legal) pictures which I exchange
>> with a few friends.  You may suspect that when the images are concatenated
>> in a particular way the low-order bits form a stego filesystem but no one
>> will be able to prove it in court.
>
>Are you concatenating these images by hand?  If so, the level of entropy
>is probably low enough to recover the information through brute force
>methods or you are hiding a very small amount of information.

I hide the relatively small amount of data within a very large amount of
data which makes it impossible to find.  Data from analog sources, like
the "real world" (images, sounds, etc) is noisy.  This is a fact of life.
Because this data is noisy I can hide information in the noise.  As long
as the information I am hiding maintains the same statistical properties
of noise it is impossible to pull the information out of the data file unless
you have the key.  If I am paranoid enough I can make this key impossible
to discover without a breakthrough in factoring.  This is the essence of
steganography and the nature of signal and noise are fundemental principles
of information theory.  No legislative action or administrative decision
can change the laws of mathematics, this fact alone is why the crypto genie
is forever out of the bottle.

>If you are not doing it by hand, you own terrorist software and will pay
>the price.

Ah yes, terrorist programs like cat and perl and operating systems like
Linux which contain a loopback filesystem that I can hook a perl
interpreter into at compile-time (which is enough for me to rewrite the
program from scratch each time if necessary, unless things like math
libraries are also outlawed on computers :)  I think that the crypto
concentration camps are going to be very crowded places.

jim, who answers to a higher law: the laws of mathematics...