From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 1997 20:18:30 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Wayner on Crypto Mimicry
Message-ID: <1.5.4.32.19970905120120.0075023c@pop.pipeline.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



The New York Times, CyberTimes <http://www.nytimes.com>

September 5, 1997

Behind Encryption Debate: 
Using a Mimicry Applet 

By PETER WAYNER

What is the true meaning of a message? This is the question that
Louis J. Freeh, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, would
like every Internet service provider to start wondering. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Article
Encryption Tops Wide-Ranging Net Agenda in Congress
(September 4, 1997) 
------------------------------------------------------------------------


In testimony before a Senate subcommittee on Wednesday, Freeh suggested that
the companies carrying the e-mail of the country should be able to provide a
way "for the immediate, lawful decryption of the communications or the
electronic information once that information is found by a judgeto be in
furtherance of a criminal activity or a national security matter." 

The only problem is that data is so easy to mutate that it is hard to
determine what is the true message. Even after discounting the jokes about
the doublespeak of politicians or the beautiful lies that lovers spin to
seduce, there are deeper questions of whether it is ever possible to find
the correct message in data. 

This applet shows how data can be mutated into innocent-sounding plaintext
with the push of a button. In this case, the destination is a voiceover from
a hypothetical baseball game between teams named the Blogs and the Whappers. 

The information is encoded by choosing the words, the players and the action
in the game. In some cases, one message will lead to a string of homeruns,
and in other cases a different message will strike out three players in a
row. See the FAQ for more information. 



The applet takes a few minutes to load. When it is ready, you'll see three
text-input windows. The first window is where you type the message that you
want the applet to encode. The second, larger window is where the
mimicry-encoded message appears. 

Mimicry can be reversed by pushing the second button. The output is
replicated at the bottom. Remember that any error in the text can mess up
the result. 

There are plenty of limitations to this system. It only sends uppercase
letters and spaces. Lowercase letters are converted to uppercase, and
anything else is converted into a space. 





How do I use to send "innocent" messages? 

Type your message into the top window, push the first button and then cut
the blather out of the second box. Most of the new browsers will let you do
this, but some older browsers don't have this capability. Upgrade to
Netscape Communicator 4.0 or Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 for this
feature. 

To unscramble the "innocent" message, the receiver needs to call up this
page and paste your message into the second box and then push the second
button. The hidden message will appear in the bottom window.