TechStuff Classic: How Steganography Works

How can you hide a message so that no one knows you're even communicating? Use steganography! Ariel Kasten joins the show to talk about the art of hiding messages.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
how Tech Arenia. Well, it is time for a classic
episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published on April

(00:25):
fift two thousand fifteen. It is titled how Steganography Works
and it is not a Dinosaur. I can't remember if
actually made that joke in this episode. I guess we're
gonna find out. Let's listen. This is an ancient listener request, folks. So, Peter,
I apologize that took so long for us to get there,
but I'm really excited that we get to cover it today.
Here's what Peter wrote. He said, I recently bought a

(00:48):
book called Data Hiding that is about steganography. I look
to see if this is something you have covered, but
found you had not. I think that this would be
an extremely interesting topic. You would be able to cover
the ways in which data can be hidden, as well
as who uses such techniques like al Qaeda, the n
s A, malware, authors, hobbyists, et cetera. Yeah, we're going

(01:10):
to cover steganography, which is not what I originally thought
it was. I originally thought it was the study of
Stegosauri stegasaurces. Yeah, I thought it was the study of
dinosaur calligraphy. So we were both on the wrong track,
as it turns out. Uh yeah, So what actually is steganography. Well,

(01:31):
steganography is the art of hiding something within something else.
It can be simple, like a hidden message in a
painting or photograph, or it can be something really complicated,
like an electronic file or message hidden in another file
or message. Yeah. Yeah, So it's essentially the the art
of being able to send a message without people even

(01:51):
knowing that you've done so, right, That's that's the goal
of steganography. So the parties in steganography are there, are
you know? This is how we break it down. You've
got the cinder that's the person who's created the message
and wants to communicate something. You have the receiver, which
is the person who the message is intended to go to.

(02:12):
You have the carrier message, which is the the the
construct that hides the secret message. So this could be whatever, Like,
it could be a painting, the boring note about your
cousin's children, or it could be a soccer ball that
happens to have a secret assage written on the inside
of it. It could be that Wilson in Castaway was

(02:35):
in fact Stagana Graham, which is the other element. So,
by the way, there are a lot of Greek words
and Greek names and some Roman names, so Latin as well,
that's going to be all of those are gonna be
popping up. There also a couple of other names from
other cultures. I'm an ignorant American, so my pronunciation is

(02:57):
going to be awful, and I can barely grasp the
American language, which I've grown up with all my life,
so mine will be work. Yeah, So just just letting
you guys know that ahead of time. So the ski
staganogram say, I'm never going to get that, otherwise known
as the secret message. We're just gonna I'm going to
call it secrets just from now on and then potentially
third parties. So in other words, people who might come

(03:20):
into contact with this message. The goal is to make
sure that those third parties are never aware that there
is a message there in the first place, and if
it's done right, they won't be Yeah. So in other words,
you could have a messenger a go between carry this
thing from one person to the other and never know
that there was something hidden in there. Although sometimes it's

(03:40):
good if they're confident, because you need to get a
message to the person who needs to decipher it on
how to decipher it right, right. If the person who
receives the message isn't aware of the method to find it,
it doesn't do them a lot of good. So if
if you have been able to collude with your receiver left,
if I'm sending a message to Ariel, and Ariel and

(04:02):
I have decided ahead of time, Hey, if I ever
need to send you a message, this is how I'm
going to do it, and this is how you're going
to see what the message is, then we're okay. But
if if it's a situation where Ariel and I have
been separated for a long time and I need to
send her a message and I needed to be secret,
I've got to figure out a way to give her
instructions as to how to retrieve that message. And sometimes

(04:25):
that involves, you know, paying somebody, like just tell her
to wash the wax off, and we'll explain what that
means a little bit later. So there, wash the wax off,
the Yeah sure, yeah, I mean just in general. So
we've got the elements here. Those are your basic elements

(04:46):
to to have Steganography actually makes sense, And now we
need to talk about the difference between that and a
related art cryptography, which, yes, cryptography is the art of
making and solving codes. Uh, but anybody can see that
it's a code. Right, So if I send a coded

(05:07):
message to arial, it may be that any third party
can't see what the message is, but they know I'm
trying to communicate to her, Yeah, because why else would
he send me a piece of paper that says music
of yeh, unless I've just fallen asleep on my keyboard,
then clearly I'm trying to say something. So and then
I'm just wasting my time trying to decipher. Right. So,

(05:29):
cryptography keys in people that something's going on. It lets
people know there's some sort of communication. And uh. You
might have a pretty simple type of code, like a
simple cipher where you know the old classic uh substitution
cipher where you substitute one letter for another, the simplest

(05:49):
being let's shift all the letters over by one. So
and uh, whenever I write the letter B, I really
mean the letter a. Whenever I write the letter C,
I really mean the letter be. This is what's called
a really bad cipher. It's easy to figure out. I
don't know. When I try to do the cryptograms in
puzzle books, had such a hard time, And it's the

(06:11):
same thing. Well, sometimes a substitution cipher can get a
little more complicated. So for example, when you substitute one
letter for another, then the next time you substitute a letter,
you actually shift over again. So in other words, the
first time you only shift over one letter, the second
time you shift over two letters, the third time you
shift over three letters. So if you know the algorithm,

(06:32):
if you know the pattern, then when you get the message,
you can reverse that and you know to look for it.
If you don't know the pattern, then you have to
spend more time trying to figure out what the pattern is.
And while that still is a fairly simple example, things
like the um the Enigma machine in World War Two,
which was the Germans way of sending coded messages. They

(06:54):
had this machine that had three different The basic one
had three different dials that they had set. And then
I had a typewriter and a bunch of lamps and
when you pressed down a key of a letter, a
lamp would light up, indicating a different letter. So let's
say I typed the letter E to type in Enigma,

(07:15):
but the letter for in lights up. Then it would
actually go a certain number of steps, so that the
next letter I type would be a totally unpredictable letter.
If I didn't have an Enigma machine of my own. Well,
that's really good, because if I tried to write a cipher,

(07:36):
I would totally lose place of where I was if
I was constantly shifting the letter, and my message would
be nonsensical, both decrypted and encrypted. Yeah, exactly, that that is.
That's the reason why the Germans were using a machine
so that way it could be predictable, but only if
both parties had the same style of Enigma machine and

(07:56):
they both knew what the initial settings were, so part
of the communication would include a a key saying this
is what you need to set it to. Although technically
they were all supposed to have a communication telling them
what settings to use each day, and they were never
supposed to repeat those settings. Eventually people got lazy, and

(08:19):
that's how those codes were eventually broken by Alan Turing,
which you can see in that film, the imitation game,
the imitation game exactly. So steganography obviously is different from cryptography,
and that yes, you're still sending secret messages, but the
message itself, the existence of the message is secret. Anybody,
any layman looking at the message or the photo or

(08:42):
the paper won't know it's there, right, So you you
can still encrypt it. You can still use cryptography. In fact,
using both together makes a lot of sense. But ultimately
with steganography, if you've hidden the message well enough and
people are not if people don't know to look for it,
it's safe to be in plain text to whomever you're

(09:04):
sending it to, depending upon what method you use, because
there are a lot of different ones, right um um.
A great way to further explain it is to go
back to the Greek. Cryptography means secret writing and stag
atography means covered writing. I pause there because I was
really surprised I said it correctly. Well, every time I

(09:25):
say it correctly, I will also be surprised. Uh yeah,
So that really that gets down to the heart of it, right,
And the combination of the two allows you to have
more secure communication. Now, there's an art to finding hidden
messages that have been concealed in this way. Yes, it
is called stag analysis, which I tried to look up

(09:47):
what the Greek of that meant, and it meant covered
breaking up, loosening of Yeah, so it's it's all very repetitive.
It just means you're uncovering the secret message, right. So
depending upon the type of uh steganogram that has been sent,
you would use a different method to find the meaning.

(10:09):
So when we're talking about the modern version of steganography,
we're really talking about ones and zeros digital information. So
stag analysis is largely concerned with that because that's that's
the main way messages are sent these days, is through
a digital file of some sort that to an outside
view looks like a normal file. There's nothing that seems

(10:32):
remarkable about it. But if you were to analyze the
actual digital information of that file, you would start to
see patterns that would indicate something hanky is going. Yes,
and in steak analysis, there are two steps to deciphering
and the first is detecting it um, which if if
it is like a handwritten message or something like that,
and it's very fairly obvious, you can do it without

(10:56):
any special software. UM. But where it does happen so
much in the digital age. Um their disk analysis programs
that will just look at it for you. Yeah, you
actually run your suspected uh secret message. So it could
be very simple like a lot of and a lot
of examples I see are photographs that have been uploaded

(11:16):
to public forums and the idea being that well, when
it's in the public eye, no one's paying attention to
it because it's just something that we see all the time.
Like if you were to post a picture to Facebook, yeah,
a lot of a lot of people do. Then because
that's so common, it doesn't tend to raise suspicion. So

(11:37):
first of all, someone has to know that there's something
to look for, right, they have to first be suspicious
that there's some form of communication going on. Then they
have to start figuring out, all right, how is this
communication happening, And then they would have to start targeting
the various means of that, and one of those might
be photographs, and they'd say, all right, let's take this
image that was uploaded to whatever site, and let's run

(12:00):
it through one of these disk analysis programs and see
if that comes up with anything that perhaps there's some
indication that something's out of place, and it might be
something that you looking at would notice if you knew
what to look for. Yeah, that's called perceptible noise. So
sometimes if audio visual files are slightly off, there might

(12:24):
be perceptible noise in there. So that would just be
an indicator, right, something saying something's not right now. That
can happen naturally, like that could just be a problem
with the file and not not be an indication that
there's anything super secret going on, or it could be
an indication that, in fact, some of the bits in

(12:45):
that file have been altered in order to send a
secret message. And in in the best case of stegnography,
you wouldn't have weird noises or distorted pixels for people
to see. Yeah, it would just be so subtle that
you would never pick up on it. And uh and
that's the reason why you need these disc analysis programs,

(13:06):
so they can look for things that are below the
perceptive level of human beings. Uh. So again we often
see the two working together makes a lot of sense.
So let's talk a little bit about the history of steganography,
because there are some gloriously awful and bloody stories just

(13:28):
just reading about them. Yeah, So first, we gotta go
to ancient Greece, which makes sense. We're talking, you know,
we're using Greek words, so it makes sense that that
a lot of the early cases involved Greek stories, and
we're gonna be talking a lot about Herodotus. I can
only do it because I listened to the pronunciation and
I wrote down a phonetic translation in our notes. That

(13:51):
is not a joke. Herodotus was a Greek historian in
the fifth century b c. And wrote a lot about
Greek history and the history of the surrounding areas of Greece,
And in fact, his writings were called the Histories. Yeah,
and or at least we have to we have to

(14:11):
take some of this with a grain of salt, because
legend got mixed up with history quite a bit. So
in fact, there are some modern accountings that suggest that
some of the familial connections he makes in his stories
were not necessarily accurate. So um one of the big ones,
in fact, the first one I have to talk about,

(14:32):
is one of those where the story talks about a
general named Harpagus who sent a staganagram to Cyrus, was
a king who was going to become the king of
kings of Persia, Son of Persia, not the Prince of Persia.
Now that's a video game, which is fun, but not

(14:53):
not something we actually need to reference here. The story, Yeah,
the story is far bloodier in fact, which is odd
to think of, depending on which version of Prince of
Persia you played and how badly you played it. But
Cyrus was going to be the king of kings of Persia.
So Persia was divided up into several kingdoms, and then
you had a sort of an over king who saw

(15:13):
over everybody, kind of like King Arthur in in English
lore Um. So cyrus Um was the grandson, according to Herodotus,
to another king of kings, Ostiagas, and so Harpagus actually
worked for Ostiagas. So Ostiogus is this king of kings,

(15:35):
and he has a dream, and in his dream, his
daughter gives birth to a son, and that son grows
up to depose osti Agus. So first he ends up
marrying his daughter off to a kind of milk toast
kind of guy, someone that he thinks is, oh well,
this guy is harmless, so any child they have is

(15:55):
not going to be a threat to me Um. And
they have a son named IRUs. According to Herodotus. Again.
Other modern accounts suggests that Cyrus and Ostiagas were not
grandfather and grandson. Yeah, they might have been related, but
not like grandfather and grandson, particularly since Cyrus ended up
marrying um a daughter a Herodotus, which would have made

(16:17):
he would have married his own aunt, which was not
common in those times. So I mean possible, but not common.
So anyway, in the story, Cyrus is the grandson, and
Ostiagas decides Harpagus needs to go out and kill Cyrus. Okay. Harpagas, though,
does not really relish the thought of spilling royal blood.

(16:39):
So he takes Cyrus and he gives Cyrus to a
shepherd and says, look after this kid, uh and raise
him as your own, and I will report back that
Cyrus is dead. Seems like a really decent guy, at
least at that point, so he goes back. He reports
that Cyrus has died, and Ostiagus says YEA. Ten years later,

(17:00):
Ostiagus finds out Cyrus is actually alive, so he punishes
Harpagus in kind of a Shakespearean awful way, and that
in the story osti Agus gets Harpagus, his son kills
him chops him up, cooks him, serves them to Harpagas
as a banquet Harpegas and then tells Harpegus, hey, by

(17:23):
the way, I hope you like your son, because that's
what you're eating. Harpegus supposedly then gathered up the remains
and gave his son a burial. He was being obedient
to the king outwardly, but inwardly had decided that he
had had enough and he wanted revenge, so he wanted
to report to Cyrus. He He ended up working very

(17:45):
hard to get other leaders of Persia to turn against
Ostiagus and wait for just the right time to give
Cyrus the signal that now is the time to attack.
So he needed to send a message to Cyrus saying
we're ready to go when you are. But asti August
had guards all along the way. So how does he
send a message. He gets a bunny bunny hair. Actually, no,

(18:12):
they're not nearly as cute as bunny rabbits, and this
hair was not nearly as cute because it was did Yeah,
they they have a guy kill a hair. They cut
the hair open, they insert the secret message into the
hair's stomach, so the hair back up and a messenger
disguised as a huntsman brings the hair to Cyrus and says,

(18:36):
you should cut open this bunny rabbit and get what
the delicious things inside are. And so Cyrus cuts open
the stitches, gets the message, sees that it's time to attack,
and that is how, according to Herodotus, Cyrus goes and
joins a revolution and overthrows Ostia Augus and then Cyrus
becomes the king. So there's a long way to go

(19:00):
for that story, but it's important to know all the
elements to explain why Harpagus was trying to send a
coded message in the first place, or hidden message. I'm
so glad we have better ways to send hidden messages
than in the stomachs of rabbits. Now, okay, this is
Jonathan from the future. I've got a hidden message in
this image file that says we need to take a
quick break, but we'll be right back. So um, here's

(19:31):
another one. This is another popular story from Herodotus. This
one involves a tyrant named Histius, which sounds like you're
strangling a snake. Yeah. Histius who was the ruler of
mild Us, and this guy was really useful to the

(19:51):
king of Persia. The King of Persia loved Histius and
decided to invite him back to become a royal advisor. Well,
that sounds it is pretty good to me. Well at first,
Histories thoughts so too. But then eventually he thought, you know,
I want to go back to being a tyrant of Maltest. Tyrant,
by the way, does not necessarily mean evil ruler, but
it did mean like having total authority over a region. Um,

(20:16):
so he said, he thought, I want to go back
to doing what I was doing before. But it would
be treason for me to deny the king? So how
do I get around this? And he comes up with
an even more treason this way to get around it.
He decides that the best way to get back to
doing what he was doing before would be to stage
a revolution back home. Uh, and then tell the king, Hey,

(20:42):
I need to go back there and squash this revolution
before it gets out of hand, because telling the king
no is so much less worse than lying to the
king and tell him. So, he decides he needs to
send this instruction to his nephew, who was in charge
of maldis Agris. And so how does he send the message, Well,

(21:03):
he gets a slave which the Greeks had back then,
and tattoos. He shaves the slave's head, tattoos the message
on the slave's scalp, then allows the slaves hair to
grow back, then sends the slave to Aristagoras with the
instruction to tell Aristagoras, Hey, you need to shave me
and read my head. So that's exactly what happens. Aristagoras

(21:24):
reads the message, starts a revolution against the Persians. Then
Histius tells the king, Hey, this is gonna be a problem,
so just send me back and I will go and
squish this right away, and we'll solve this before it
turns into a big problem. And of course they can
go a loyal advisor. Sure. Yeah, So Histius heads on

(21:46):
his way back. However, there were some folks who were
a little suspicious of Histius and his convenient revolution, and
so eventually Histaius goes on the run because people are
actually after or him thinking that you know, he's he's
committed treason. Yeah, he has done that thing, and so

(22:08):
he ends up getting exiled and eventually to an island.
He becomes a pirate for a while, and then he's
eventually captured by one of the king of Persia's subjects.
Who knows that if he sends his tis back to
the king, the king will pardon him, So he just
goes ahead and execute his t is right then and there,
since the head of his is to the king saying, hey,

(22:30):
I caught him and killed him for you. And the
king actually supposedly gave the head of his tis an
honorable burial because he never suspected anything was up. He
didn't believe his is could have committed any kind of
treason against him. So uh, dumb or nice? Not a

(22:52):
lot of nice stories in ancient Greece. Uh, And then
you've got another one, another herodotist story, another herodotus story.
I was out to mention it, and then I realized
that I couldn't actually say his name. There was an
exiled Greek named named Demeritus, and uh. He needed to
warn the king of Sparta, Leonidas that kings er Ses
the first was going to attack them. So he took

(23:16):
writing tablets, which were wood tablets covered in wax and
you would scratch a message into the wax, and instead
he took off all the wax and scratched message into
the wood, and then recovered the tablets and wax so
that they looked like they were blanked tablets, and he
sent those to the king to warn him. Uh. But
proposedly no one knew why they were getting these blank tablets.

(23:38):
They didn't necessarily know there was a message. Why are
we getting just we got plenty of tablets and no
one writes anything of use here in Sparta anyway. Yeah,
supposedly the queen, Queen Gorgo figured out what it was, said,
you got you need to take the wax off. I
but there's a message under there and there were um
but it didn't help them because the Spartans were brutally

(23:59):
defeat it. Uh. And if the story sounds familiar to you,
it's because it is the story three the comic movie.
Yeah story, that's essentially that's the tale the three hundred
Spartans who who tried to hold a pass and managed
to delay xer c S so that the invasion of
Greece ultimately would fail. But the Spartans were completely wiped out,

(24:24):
or at least the the three hundred were completely wiped
out as a result. Moving forward to Roman times, Tacitus
invented a way to use a predecessor of dice to
hide messages. So these these dice like things which I
can't remember the name now. It's like an estralla alley
or something like that. But I know I've totally mangled that,

(24:46):
so I apologize. But they had little holes drilled in them,
and you could string them together, and in this case, uh,
Tacitus was using them to string them together in specific
orders to relay different type some messages. But if anyone
were stopped with them, they just looked like it was
a toy. It didn't look like it was anything of significance,

(25:06):
although they might play with it and mess up the message.
That Yeah, if you were to break the thread so
that they were no longer threaded together in the proper way,
then the message would be lost. Uh. This, by the way,
it would end up having a specific name a semigram,
because it is being used as a non text based message.
So you don't you don't translate it into texts so

(25:28):
much as you say, this series of symbols means this
particular thing. Uh. You also have a guy named Johannes
Trithmius in the Middle Ages, in the sixteenth century actually,
who wrote a book titled Steganograph Stega Nagraphia yes, which
was a stagram in and of itself, this I did

(25:50):
not know, which is pretty cool. Yeah. It outwardly it
seemed to be a series of writings on magic, but
in secret it contained a message on the treatise of Steganography.
That's now that's really cool that you're like, Okay, you've
gotta be smart enough to know that this is a
book about secret messages, because it itself is a secret message.

(26:11):
Uh yeah, really interesting, and then we can skip ahead.
I mean, obviously these have been used repeatedly in multiple ways.
There's another great example that during World War One, the
German embassy in the United States sent a message to
Berlin that used what's called a null cipher. Null ciphers
are not very secure at all because once you know

(26:32):
that there's a possibility, it's very easy to find them.
But basically it's when you take the first letter of
each word in a message and that spells out a
new message. So here's an example that's often cited. I
don't know that this was ever actually sent as a message,
but it's always used as an example. Here's the the
full message, which was or the carrier message, if you will.

(26:54):
It was President's embargo ruling should have immediate notice. Graves
situation affecting international law, statement for shadows ruin of many neutrals,
yellow journals, unifying national excitement immensely. See, they really had
me until the yellow journals. Like I was following that message,
I knew what they were trying to send. Well, they

(27:15):
could have been talking about yellow journalism, but that's a
different thing anyway, and you wouldn't know why a German
embassy would write about it. But at any rate, the
secret message, if you take those first letters, says Pershing
sales from n y New York, June first or June I,
upper case I. So Pershing was the U. S General

(27:35):
who led American the American expeditionary forces in World War One.
So this would be a message from German, the German
embassy to Germany saying, Hey, this American general is sailing
out of New York on this date. Expect him to
be in the in the European theater within several weeks.
That kind of thing. Uh. And now we'll talk about
some of the types of steganography, because there's a whole

(27:57):
bunch of because really, any way that you can hide
a message inside something is technically steganography. So these are
just some examples. Really, it's not an exhaustive list because
that would be impossible. For instance, uh, there's the old
Greek ways we talked about um in in history of
hiding something inside or under something. Great example is in

(28:19):
the Second World War, the British Secret Service hid escape
kit pieces in monopoly games and sent them to the
prisoners of war in Germany along with Red Cross supplies. Yeah,
so you could you get these deliveries if you're a
prisoner of war, and you know, the Germans would say,
all right, well this is just humanitarian aid or whatever,
and as long as it keeps the prisoners mollified, then

(28:40):
we'll go ahead and give them to them, not realizing
that they were supplying the prisoners with the very tools
the prisoners might be able to use to break free,
which is pretty interesting. And by when the prisoners break free,
did they have egg on their face? So the semigrams
I talked about earlier, the dice that are threatened together,
that's just one example that could be in lots of

(29:02):
different versions, like iconography or signs or photographs, or even
like the placement of items on a desk. So let's
say I've got I could have a webcam set up
on my desk, for example, so that people who log
into the web could see me, you know, theoretically just
working at work like that's all I'm doing. But maybe

(29:22):
depending upon where my coffee cup is, or depending upon
where a certain stack of papers happened to be, that
might be an actual message itself. So Ariel looking at
the webcam might say, oh, well, Jonathan's gonna go to
Manual's Tavern today because I see where the combination of
stuff is. I don't know why I would secretly be

(29:43):
telling you that, because all of your fans trying to
follow you. Yeah, that's it. I'm surrounded by the thronging fans.
Who And Manual's Tavern is such a low profile place, right.
Uh that's by the way, if you're not from Atlanta
or never been here, Manual's Tavern is a very popular
spot for artists and and playwrights and political fans and

(30:05):
sports figures. Political figures. Yeah, President Obama came here recently,
and it's just kind of it's kind of like a
like I think of it like cheers. Yeah, it's really
like cheers with chickens. On the roof. Yeah, yeah, there
are chickens on the roof. That that's not it's not
a joke. They use their eggs for breakfast, they do.

(30:26):
Another example would be the car done grill. It sounds
like a good restaurant. It does, doesn't it. It's a
classic example. I was first proposed in the fifteenth century.
So here's how it works. You've probably seen this. So
you take a sheet of clean paper or in the
case of the Middle Ages, parchment, and you set that down.
You take a second sheet and you cut little holes

(30:46):
in that sheet and strategic places. You lay the second
sheet on top of the first sheet, and then you
write in your secret message in those holes, using the
holes as kind of like almost like a stencil. And
so it's only bits and pieces. Sometimes sometimes it might
be a word. Sometimes it might just be a single letter.
But you do that throughout, using the holes as your

(31:07):
guide to write the secret message. Then you take your
stencil off and you write in the You fill in
the rest of the space with a boring message. That
means you know very little in the grand scheme of things.
So only someone who would have a part a comparable stencil,
so something that they have a sheet of paper that

(31:27):
has the same general holes cut out of it. They
could lay that on top of the full message and
read the secret message that's underneath. I actually tried to
make a card and grill a while back back when
I was in school and do a secret message like that.
It is harder than I imagined it would be because
once you put your secret message in, you then have
to make sure the rest of your message lines up right.

(31:49):
You have to make it make enough sense, like how
do you plan out the rest of your message so
that you can do this unless you are to create
a message from the very beginning, and then you create
a grill that fits on top of your existing message
that shows what which words are the most important, and
then you send it. But then you've got to figure out, well,

(32:10):
how do I get how do I get the grill?
How do I get the the stencil to the person
I need to send it to? Because if I send both,
then clearly the jig is up, you know, So it
is a little tricky. I love this next one You've got. Yeah,
this next one. I had to double check it because
I didn't think it was possibly real. But people would

(32:31):
knit Morris code into garments and then send those garments
on the couriers for people to decipher. And you think
it was just like a knit line of Yeah, just
a pattern, just a pattern, yea on clothing. I think
that's super cool. I want to start doing that when
I have kids, I'm gonna knit Morse code into all
their clothes. They'll be fantastic things like things like do
your chores if this child is found. Well, that's a

(32:58):
I like that you expect eyes to come across your
children because I can't think of anyone else who typically
uses Morse code on a frequent basis. Uh. I like
the next one too, which is also pretty cool, the
idea that just through through formatting a document, you can
create a secret message. Yeah, you can add an extra space,
which most people don't notice. I do a lot of

(33:20):
editing at my job, and so I often see extra
spaces at before after a period, or before a certain word,
like before a hyphen or after a hyphen. But you
can add those extra spaces before the important words in
any word that you find that has an extra space before.
That's part of your cipher. Nice. I've also seen where
you could do things like subtly change the font, yes,

(33:41):
like really subtle, like courier to courier new which is
and a casual glance it looks the same, but if
you're paying attention, you can tell the difference, and thus
you put the important words in the different font. And
as long as the messages, like as long as your
carrier message is long enough and your secret message is
short enough, people are probably not going to pick up

(34:03):
on it. You can also vaguely change the skew as well.
That that one's a little bit more noticeable, right, right,
So it's you know, some of these again can get
pretty risky if your secret message is pretty long. This
is true in general, right, The longer your carrier message,
the more secure the secret is going to be, assuming
that the secret is not itself very long. If I have, like,

(34:25):
if I'm trying to hide a secret message in a tweet,
that's gonna be hard because they only have a hundred
forty characters to start with. Yeah, and then if I'm
trying to hide a message in that, then it has
to be a pretty small message. Otherwise it's just gonna
look like a tweet. It would probably have to be
a cryptogram, yeah, where individual letters mean full things. Or right,

(34:48):
or or like just a regular code where someone has
a codebook and they know that when I use this
word that that means something else. Yeah, in that case,
that would that would be more of a code and
ah than than a secret message in this sense. But
there are the ones too. There's also an invisible ink,
which is a thing. People have actually used it for

(35:09):
reals and also it's usually called sympathetic inc in the biz.
Because you would have a regular message written out in
normal inc that would have, you know, very boring, you know,
no reason to raise suspicion. You would write the actual
secret message and invisible ink kind of between the lines,
and then the person who receives it would have to
treat it. However they need to treat it, usually like

(35:30):
adding a little heat or maybe adding a certain chemical
to bring out the invisible ink so that you can
make it legible, and then you would be able to
read the secret stuff. And another way to hide messages
would be through photography. Yeah, like the Pueblo incident, which
as far as stagonography goes, is kind of like a
semigram where uh crew of the USS Pueblo was captured

(35:54):
by North Korea right before the Vietnam War. They were
an electronic intelligent ship and they were forced to take
propaganda photos, and in those propaganda photos, they all rested
with their hands on their faces or their shoulders in
a very nonchalant way, and it was actually a code
for the US to decipher. That's pretty incredible. It really
is so similar to what I was describing with the webcam,

(36:17):
the idea of just having this this foresight that you
know clearly you thought ahead, so that the person who
sees it knows what the meaning is behind whatever you're
whatever the images. Yes, and there there there are more
complicated versions of that. For instance, there you can systematically
change pixel colors to correspond with letters in the alphabet

(36:39):
and then only change like the first pixel every square
centimeter or millimeter in photo or every so many lines,
and people can get the message that way. That. Yeah,
that's definitely really very subtle, especially you know if you're
using things like black and white photos, where you can
you can change those things and they're not called out
as much, because you could make it like a square

(37:03):
that was going to be very dark a much lighter gray,
and if you know what to look for, then you
could see the pattern but otherwise you might just think, oh,
this is just poor developing or whatever. It's it's the
it's a graininess of the photo. Um. You could use
an existing piece of text, like a newspaper. This was
used during the Cold War all the time, where uh

(37:23):
you would use like a pen to put tiny holes
above important letters, and then so you would grab the
newspaper hold it up so you can see where the
holes were, and that would give you the letters to
spell out or sometimes a full word to spell out
whatever the secret message was. UM. Or you might use
a dot with invisible ink if you wanted to make

(37:44):
sure people like could pick up the newspaper and hold
it up and not see light coming through at strategic locations.
But then of course you would have to treat the
newspaper to whatever it was that you know, would bring
the invisible inc ounts are really important and steagatography like
they're used in many way. Yeah, yeah, there's I actually
got to see examples of this because I went to

(38:05):
the Spy Museum which is in Washington, d C. And
they had examples of micro dots. And micro dots are
kind of think of it like micro film. It's tiny
little bits of film that look like a period. That's
how small they are. And unless you were to hold
it up and see that it was in fact film

(38:25):
and not just a solid blob of ink, you would
never have suspected of being anything other than a punctuation mark.
And it can hold an incredible amount of information because
you know they're There are ways to enlarge photos. We're
talking about the old film style, right. This doesn't mean
you can do it digitally too, but we're talking old school.

(38:47):
So there are ways where you could take a photo
and then blow it up and blow it up and
blow it up so that you get like a poster
size or larger. Well, there are also ways where you
could shrink it down and shrink it down and shrink
it down, and uh, I was reading one way that
cuts so technical that I gave up on the chance
of trying to even describe it. But ultimately they said

(39:07):
it was two hundred and ten times smaller than the
original photograph. And so you could take a picture of
say a document, top secret document, and then you shrink
it down to this size so it looks like it's
a you know, a period. You just cut out a
little piece of the paper, you insert this in and
to casual glance, it seems like it's just a regular

(39:29):
sheet of paper with punctuation. But when you are in
the right hands, which might be the wrong hands, depending
on what side you're on, then you can find out, um,
what is actually there. This was a process that was
created by a man named Emmanuel goldberg Um and used
it for spying, and very popular, particularly amongst Soviet Union

(39:50):
spies at the time. I would imagine nowadays if you
used micro dots in a digital format, it would be
a lot harder to detect because you couldn't hold up
the paper and see the something was amiss, Yeah, yeah,
it was. It's the game has changed significantly, and by
this time, obviously we're talking about something a lot more

(40:10):
subtle than a dead rabbit. Yeah. But but sometimes we
can have things that are just as irritating as maybe
a dead rabbit would be, such as spam the mickry
uh disguising messages that you want to send as spam
emails or nonsensical musings or what not. You do this
by messing up the placement of the punctuation, or the

(40:33):
type of the fonts, or the grammar of the message.
As a means to communicating the secret. Yeah, I love this.
I actually saw an example of this where, uh, someone
used grammar as the key indicator, and so you would
read the message and whenever you found a grammatical error,
that was actually an indicator that this is where you
need to pay attention. Uh, that was kind of interesting. Well,

(40:56):
you would think it would be easy to decipher, but
with as much spam email as everybody gets nowadays, you
don't even think to look, well, right, yeah, you just
especially if you were to broadcast this, so that it's
not something that just one person gets, because again, we're
all used to getting that spam. Most of us would
never even look twice at it. We would just see, oh,

(41:17):
spam message deleted. So you could actually have security by
sending it to lots of people, because then it looks
like it's quote unquote legitimate spam. That seems like a
weird thing to say, but that's that's where it is.
Now we're getting into the more modern versions where this
is where we need things like a disk analysis software

(41:37):
in order to discover it. We have a little bit
more to say about steganography, but before we get to that,
let's take another quick break. So digital files. Let's talk
about these in general, and this can refer to pretty
much any kind of digital file like audio, video, images,

(42:01):
any of that sort of stuff. So we all know
digital files are made up ultimately of strings of ones
and zeros. Yeah, so here's the thing. Some of those
bits are more important than others. Not all bits are equal.
Some of those bits are not so important. So if
you were to pick the least significant bits or l

(42:22):
s B s, you can do something called the least
significant bit insertion, which is where you alter a bit,
and by altering a series of bits, you can create
a message. Now, it takes several bits to make just
one character in the alphabet, so you have to be
very succinct with your messages because the more of these

(42:45):
you mess up, the more likely that will it will
be detectable by somebody who's paying really close attention, either
close attention to your activities or close attention to the file.
So if you do it well, and you and you're
very careful with it, most people are never gonna notice.
And this is what we talk about when someone posts

(43:07):
an image to a public forum and there's a hidden
message in those bits. Uh Yeah, And generally speaking, you
want to go. If you're making one of these, you
want to go with a lossless format as opposed to
lossy compressed versions, because technically you would normally create this
this message in the lossless fine style and put it

(43:30):
in there and then allow it to be compressed. So
if it's a lossless format that then is compressed, you
don't lose any information that way. Uh. These compression algorithms
are very good at keeping the original information in tact,
so that way you know your message is not going
to get altered lossy formats. The way lossy formats work
is they look for information that doesn't seem important and

(43:51):
then they drop it, and that's one of the ways
they compressed the file size. So if you put a
secret message in a file that's then going to be
compressed in this way, your secret message could be part
of the stuff that gets dropped or altered and then
you can't communicate. So if you do want to post
a picture with a secret message on Facebook, you should
use a gift instead of a j pick right, unless

(44:11):
you insist on pronouncing it Jeff, in which case I
don't even want to talk to you. Did I say
you said gifts? Thank goodness. See that's the way I
pronounce it too. I don't because it if you put
a T at the end of that, it's a gift
and G stands for graphic. That's a good sound, not
a Jiuh, don't get me. But that's again not the
only type of digital information that could be altered, right, yeah,

(44:34):
I mean you can also alter the audio files. I
think we talked about this already. By yeah, I mean
not just not just digital audio, like not just m
P three but even void calls, voice over Internet protocol calls. Yeah,
you could. And there's also water market. Yes, there is
digital water marking, which is used to protect intellectual property

(44:55):
and by embedding information like the creator and the copyright
and et cetera into the file. Um. And that way,
if people try to claim it as their own, they
could say, nope, here's my water mark. See it's got
all my little information in there. Sure. Um. They also
use digital water water marking in a method called fingerprinting,
where they put a different, unique water mark on each

(45:18):
copy of the document or information they send out. And
that way, if someone tries to copy it or send
it out themselves to people who shouldn't get it, they
can say, oh, all of these have that unique water mark,
so we know who sent it. Bobby's in trouble because
this is the version that we sent to Bobby, and
everyone else got a different uh digital watermarks, so we

(45:38):
narrowed it down. We know who is at fault, or
we know who was compromised. Their security might have been compromised.
That's really cool. Uh yeah, then we've got subliminal channels,
which is not probably what you think it is. It
isn't like messages secretly in movies or playing my music
back where there's nothing like that. No, it's not like

(45:58):
John is dead, missing Miss Simmons, none of that. Uh. Now,
this is something that was proposed in by a mathematician
and cryptographer named Gustavus J. Simmons Uh and Simmons poet
proposed something called the prisoners problem, and it's a thought experiment.
This is the way the thought experiment works. You've got

(46:20):
two accomplices who are captured during the while they're trying
to commit a crime. Okay, Bob and Jen Narcott. Usually
it's Bob and Alice actually, so we got half of
them already. But Bob and Jennaricott. Uh, and there put
into the same jail, but Bob is put in one cell.
Jen has put on a cell on the opposite end

(46:40):
of the jail, so there's no way for them to
communicate directly. The warden is told, hey, these two want
to be able to talk. What how do we do that?
And the warden says, all right, here's the deal. You
will be allowed to communicate to each other, but I
get to see everything you send to one another. So
that way, if there's any messages about trying to break

(47:01):
out of jail, I'm going to get it immediately and
you're gonna be stopped. That's a nice warden, because I'd
just be like, you guys can't talk to each other,
deal with it. It gets nicer actually because Bob and
Jen say, all right, but we want to make sure
that our messages are genuinely coming from the other person.
And we want, in other words, we want to make
sure that you, Mr Warden, aren't going in and messing

(47:24):
up our messages. So we want to be able to
authenticate that our messages come from each other. So we
have to we want to be able to come up
with a way to say it's essentially a signature to
say yes, this actually came from Bob, or yes this
actually came from Jen, and the warden says, well, all right,
if you if you agree to my terms, I agree

(47:45):
to your terms. We can all do this. What Simmons
said was, if you're willing to give up a little
of that authentication security, you could take some of the
authentication message. Let's say that it's one fifth as long
as your actual message. Still would be really long for authentication,
but let's say so let's say that then you change

(48:08):
some of that authentication which normally would look like it's random,
like it's supposed to look random, so that way, uh,
you know, it's it's not if it's predetermined in a
way that everyone knows about, like if everyone knows the
key and the algorithm, then there's no authentication there. Uh.
But instead of it actually being random, it just looks random,

(48:28):
and you've actually changed some of the authentication message so
that that's where the secret messages. It's not within the
body of the actual message, it's in the authentication. Uh.
Now that was just a thought experiment, but turned out
that that's actually the way. A lot of this is
a lot of uh, steganography happens today too, is that

(48:48):
it ends up being in the authentication kind of like
the digital water mark, rather than in the message itself.
And that is an example another example of how steganography
and cryptography work together. Yeah, but is authentication is all
about cryptography, so it's it's manipulating the two. So let's
talk about people who actually use this stuff. Not a

(49:09):
big surprise. Yeah, that's a that's a big one. In fact, again,
at the Spy Museum, I saw example after example of
this kind of stuff. If you've never been to the
Spy Museum, by the way, if you ever go to Washington,
d C. I recommend it. Um. I recommend going early
because it's a very it's it's a museum that fills
up with kids, and kids are great, despite what I

(49:33):
say about them, but they do make it difficult to
maneuver through the museum and see everything. It sounds like
a lot of the stuff in the Spy Museum might
be pretty technical for a kid. Yeah, it can definitely
go over a kid's head. There's a lot of reading
because there are a lot of descriptions that explain what
the various devices and pictures and everything, what they mean

(49:55):
and there's some very interesting videos, but for kids they'd
be really boring. Oh it's one of those things where
like the idea of spies is really super sexy and
exciting and oh, James Bond, kids are gonna have fun.
But ultimately, I think you need to be like a
teenager or older. Maybe maybe not necessarily a teenager, but

(50:16):
like eleven or twelve to really kind of start thinking, oh,
this is kind of cool. Younger, I think it gets
lost on you. Although they have some cool interactive stuff too,
but you don't get to play with like shoeguns or anything.
Now that you don't get to play with shoeguns, but
you do get to assume a secret identity. They give
you a secret identity and you have to remember certain
facts about yourself so that if you're ever stopped and questioned,

(50:37):
you can answer with your cover. So if you forget
your cover, you're caught that So, so here's an example
of spies who use steganography. In two thousand nine and
two thousand ten, the FBI arrested ten covert Russian sleeper
agents who had been communicating in multiple ways, including stecken bography. Uh,

(51:01):
they'd be posting those photos that I was talking about,
the same sort of thing. They would post photos to
public forums, which in fact included the secret messages that
could be picked up if you ran them through analysis.
But you know, if you use that software, you can
pick them up, but otherwise you probably wouldn't notice. They
also used other things like in this blink and they
would do secret bag swaps, like classic spy stuff like

(51:24):
we'll meet in the trade station, I will give you bag,
you would walk away. They got discovered because of the
photos they were posting, right well, they that and the
fact that all right, so the photos you had to
run them through a particular piece of software to decode
what the message was, to pull out the letters that
were hidden inside these photos, right Because one of the

(51:46):
problems with with binary code is we humans, we don't
read it so well. So that's why we need software
to be able to pull that stuff and say, all right,
here are the bits that are important, here's what translates into.
So one of the things they needed was security to
make sure people couldn't access the software that would decode everything.

(52:08):
So they had a password that all of them had
to share. It was the same password they would type
in to the software to allow them to decrypt something.
And it was a twenty seven character long passwords. So
that's pretty secure except someone wrote it down, so the
FBI gets hold of the written password. By the way, folks,

(52:29):
if you write your password down and someone finds it,
guess what, You're not being secure. I don't care how
long your password is or how many upper and lower
case letters you throw in there. Uh. So, the FBI
found the password, they were able to intercept messages, they
were able to round up these ten sleeper agents, and
ultimately they were exchanged in a prisoner swap with Russia. UH.

(52:51):
Russia had four prisoners, three of whom had been accused
of high treason, all of whom were Russian citizens, but
they had all been colluding in some way or another
or been accused of colluding with the United States or
the United Kingdom. So these four were swapped out for
the ten that were found in America. And it was
all done kind of quietly because there were still, I

(53:14):
mean there still are today uh tensions between the United
States and Russia, and no one wanted to make that worse. Yeah, man,
could you imagine being one of the ten agents? And
you're worth not even being half a person. Well, and
not only that, but those ten people who went back
to Russia, they were not technically put in prison, but

(53:36):
they were detained for weeks for debrifing. So things did
not go well for them, not for all of them
anywhere now, especially probably not for the one who wrote
down the past words. So then we have examples in
military and government. Now, governments traditionally aren't crazy about steganography
software getting out into the wild because they don't want

(53:57):
people to be able to use it. Yeah, especially uh
foreign countries. They're actually have been laws put in place
to keep us from sending strong encryption software. Yeah. There
there's been a lot of debate in government about whether
or not it should be legal to export encryption software,
and there's been a lot of argument on either case,

(54:18):
and only that the government wasn't crazy about having public
arguments about this, or having arguments on the public record,
because that would mean people would find out that such
a thing even existed, and they were worried that even
people finding out that such software was possible would create
more incidents of people using it. So there was probably yeah,

(54:43):
but but it was it was a sort of a
catch twenty two. You know, they were like, well, we
need to talk about this, but we can't talk about
it because if people know we talked about it, they'll
know that it exists. Um. I have a quote from
meeting about how to handle this that said a substantial
amount of material is not appropriate for a public meeting.
That's exactly what I'm talking about, Like, we we can't

(55:05):
debate this because if it's on the public record, it
will cause problems. Um. Now, despite that, there ultimately there
would be uh allowances for exporting uh this encryption software
because business doesn't have to do business um, and we
want our businesses to be secure. Yeah. So then we

(55:25):
have terrorists who also have used steganography. The there was
there were reports after the nine eleven attacks that al
Qaeda had been using steganography techniques to communicate. They were
actually supposedly using pornography. They were hiding their messages there
because who would think to look for secret messages in
that very very much so. And also they were thought

(55:48):
to be less likely to have used them because it
goes against their very world view. But that's what made
it a perfect place to hide a message, and people
were worried that maybe they got the the tools from US,
right yeah. They were worried that they got the encryption
tools from those same companies that had argued that they

(56:08):
should be allowed to export their products, and in fact,
it created a lot of soul searching on the parts
of those people. They said, well, are we responsible? And
ultimately they came up with the conclusion that even if
a ban had been put in place, even if they
had never been allowed to sell their products, someone else
would have come up with the same thing because there

(56:30):
was a need. And so once you identify a need,
someone's going to come up with a solution. And there
are people who send stuff they shouldn't send all the time,
just just the challenging authority aspect of it. They're like, oh,
we shouldn't be using this or giving it to other people,
so we're going to write right yeah, there's the whole
argument of information wants to be free. And with that

(56:52):
you would say that, well, if you're the harder you
try to keep information away from people, the harder people
will try to make sure they get that information. But
having encryption software go out to foreign places and being
developed in in other places than the US means that
we have drive to create better encryption, right and decryption

(57:12):
and decryption. Yeah, so it actually it pushes it pushes
the art forward. And this is something we also see
an artificial intelligence, where we see as one part of
security gets better, uh than people find new ways to
make that security vulnerable, and then the security gets better.
And while individual attacks are terrible or individual like vulnerabilities

(57:39):
are terrible, the overall story is that stuff gets better
over time. But that's you know, that's a hard view
to take, depending upon the particulars in this case, a
very hard one to take. Also, writers and journalists have
used steganography sometimes just to entertain. Like there's this guy
h Brown, Charlie No, Dan, Yeah, he wrote, he wrote

(58:03):
a couple of books like Angels and Demons and Da
Vinci Code. It's almost said Da Vinci's Notebook. That's totally
different but really good. Yeah, some we're familiar with their
work there, but it's not the SAME's. They might have
messages in their music. Well I'm sure there are. There
are some, probably some very important messages and things like

(58:24):
the Magic Castle in the Sky so entitle of the song.
But yeah, so Dan Brown of course very famous for
writing these books and there were lots of examples of steganography,
In fact, key plot points revolving around uh steganography and
various kinds of religious iconography and other elements too. I

(58:44):
remember in Angels and Demons. I think it was Angels
and Demons where I got irritated by one of them
because it was a brand like a as in something
you would brand an animal with heat up and right, uh,
and if it's spelled out Illuminati. And then you discovered
that if you turned it degree so in other words,

(59:06):
if you turned it upside down, it's still spelled Illuminati.
And then the suggestion was because it was because the
way the font was designed and the way the way
it was was that only someone with the secret Illuminati
knowledge could ever make this thing. And I thought, that's
obviously crap, because you made it, Dan Brown, in order

(59:26):
for this to happen. So I don't know how you
could suggest that only one human being would or only
one group of human beings would be clever enough to
do this. That's demonstrably false. But anyway it was meant for, Yeah,
it's meant to be a good story. Also, artists obviously
very important in stagonography, particularly in the old ways where

(59:47):
you had to hide a message within something, you know,
and sometimes it was just done for entertainment. Sometimes it
was done for specific purposes to hide things. UM. I
had heard that Da Vinci hit a lot of secret
messages in his artwork. Yeah, we hear, we hear that
from da Vinci himself sometimes. Ariel and I have both
worked for the Georgia Renaissance Festival, and another a mutual

(01:00:07):
friend of ours, plays a young da Vinci very well. Yeah,
so if you ask him about his secret messages, he
has hilarious responses for that. But the the what you're
alluding to, of course, I mean, there are a lot
of theories I shouldn't say, hypotheses about secret messages hidden
in things like the Last Supper, which is one of
the most famous paintings Da Vinci ever produced. Um, And

(01:00:30):
of course, uh, the da Vinci Code ended up talking
a lot about that, obviously. Uh. One of the hypotheses
I saw, which was interesting was put forward by an
uh I T guy in information uh information technology professional
who had created a mirror image of the Last Supper,

(01:00:52):
so essentially took like imagine you have Photoshop and you
copy the image, but then you flip it, so now
it's it's inverted the other way, and then you make
it translucent, and then you lay it back down on
top of the original image. So now you've got this
doubled image on top of one another. And then said,
look at all the interesting things that pop up when
you do this. There were figures on either side that

(01:01:15):
were said to look like knights templar. There was in
the center in front of Jesus there appeared to be
a chalice like perhaps it's the Holy Grail and this
kind of thing, and that there appeared to be a
figure standing behind Jesus holding a baby. H a lot
of other elements that were supposedly brought to light. But

(01:01:35):
that raises the question one, how could da Vinci have
done this himself? Now, he was known for mirror writing,
where he could write with both hands, and he could
right right to left and left to right simultaneous. He
would have had to have painted two pictures left to
right and right to left at the same time and
lay them over each other. He would have to paint
two identical pictures. Yeah, and who would ever find out

(01:01:58):
about this? I mean, there's no way to to see
the message The whole point of steganography is to communicate
to someone. If no one knows that there's a message
there and no one knows how to get that message,
you're not communicating, you're just shouting, you are I mean,
he could have put that message in there just too

(01:02:19):
or not put a message in there, but put something
in there to seem like a message, just to mess
with people. That's possible. But yeah, most art historians kind
of dismissed these various hypotheses. Doesn't mean that they're all false.
It may mean, you know, there may have been things
that da Vinci threw into some uh, either as sketches
or his paintings or whatever, that were either just amusements

(01:02:39):
or you know, they weren't intended to be anything secret.
It was just something that he incorporated into the design.
It's possible, and then, you know, depending upon the guy,
probable da Vinci was it was a bit of an
eccentric isn't there an article about this on Yes? The
article is is, uh, how the da Vinci code doesn't work?

(01:03:03):
So if you want to know more about that, Yeah,
there's also an article about are there hidden messages in
the Last Supper? We have articles on both of those things,
so you should definitely check those out at how stuff
works dot com. Uh. Then there are other examples, like
one of my favorites is Mad magazines fold in, which
was created by the writer and artist Al Jaffee, who

(01:03:24):
created originally in nine four. It's been in practically every
Mad magazine since then. And if you've never seen a
fold in on Mad Magazine, then and I'm talking about
the actual magazine, not the television series, not Mad TV,
and not a digital copy of the night No, no,
you need the you need the physical one. It is

(01:03:45):
the the inside back cover is the fold in, and
it has two points, and you're supposed to fold one
point over to the second point, and it creates a
new image. So when you look at it, normally it's
one image, and it's the setup for a joke, and
you do the fold then it's the punchline to that joke,
and usually it's it's a twist on whatever. The big pictures.

(01:04:06):
And actually, Jeff, he said, if I didn't have to
worry about the big picture as opposed to a little picture,
I could turn out like twelve of these a day.
But getting them to work together takes a lot more
planning and the way he did it. He drew them
all by hand on a surface that did not fold,
so it had to look right when it was folded,
but he while he was drawing it, I couldn't fold

(01:04:30):
it to make sure it was working. After after I
encountered my first folding in a Mad magazine, I actually
went into a Where's Waldo book and tried to do
it in there and didn't work. No, No, I didn't
find Waldo any faster. No, I didn't find any secret punchline.
That's a little disappointed. He did, however, ruin the Where's Waldo? Books?
So there's that. Uh. Another Man Magazine contributor, Sergio Ariganez,

(01:04:56):
he used to draw a comic book called Grew the Wanderer,
which was about it's very cartoony. If you've ever seen
Sergio Ragan as his art style, you know it's cartoony.
And it was about a buffoonish barbarian character, very dim
witted character named Grew g r o O and very silly.
But he would hide a message in every comic book.

(01:05:18):
Uh usually said this is the secret message, or something like,
good job, you found the secret message. But it would
always be incorporated into the artwork in some way, like
in some cases it would be written into the scroll
work on a really elaborate uh fret board for a
loop something like that, so you would have to really
look for it. And again, if you didn't know there

(01:05:40):
was a message there, you probably never would have seen it. Yeah,
I feel like a lot of comics have done that
here and there. If you look really closely, you can
find I know there are some comics who hide their
name in pictures and the artwork as well, but there
are other people who use them too, like system administrators
UM just to make encryption extra secure, like talked about

(01:06:00):
before with authentication codes UM, and then like people who
just want to protect their intellectual property. You can even
do it for your own personal journal. If if you
write in a diary and you don't want anybody to
read it, you can read what you really want to say.
You can hide it in there, right, So the stuff
that you write could be, you know whatever, but the
actual meaning, the things that you truly want to preserve

(01:06:23):
for yourself, you could hide away from from people prying eyes.
So if you you know, if you if you're tired
of losing that little key to your lockable journal. I
know I gave up years ago. I have no idea
what's in that book anymore? Um, probably best left unknown. Probably,
you know, my past is a shady one at best.

(01:06:43):
So that kind of wraps up this discussion about steganography,
what it is, who uses it, you know, what goes
into it. It is a fascinating field. I mean again,
the idea of creating a way to communicate without anyone
ever being aware that it was an intention no communication
is I mean, it's kind of kind of awesome, it

(01:07:04):
really is. And the numerous ways that people have come
up with to do steganography is it's just mind blowing.
I'm not nearly that creative, no, I well, mostly I
don't have a lot of secret messages to send to people,
so I don't have a whole lot of occasion to
think on it. But yeah, it really does show people's
ingenuity to come up with new ways to hide things.

(01:07:24):
I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech stuff
back from If you have suggestions for topics I should
tackle in future episodes, or maybe you want to follow
up to something that you've heard in a classic episode,
let me know best way to do that is to
reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is
text Stuff HSW and not talk to you again really soon.

(01:07:50):
Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your faith were chums.