Will their arrest chill demand for American hamburgers in Russia? – just when Russian-American relations were beginning to warm up.
The Economist, July 1, 2010
Since 11 Russians were brought in from the cold on suspicion of having spied against the United States, only a few days after Presidents Obama and Medvedev sat down to eat hamburgers on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., the new buzzword is steganography. It refers to the art or practice of concealing a message, image, or file within another message, image, or file. In order to understand if those hamburgers were tainted by coded messages, we need to address the linguistic aspects of Russia’s spying technology.
Previously known only to a few people (mostly those working in the secret services of repressive, and in rare cases progressive regimes), the mysterious word steganography has come out of the shadows and is now being explained on television news and commentaries.
Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. The word steganography is of Greek origin and means "concealed writing" from the Greek words steganos (στεγανός) meaning "covered or protected", and graphein (γράφειν) meaning "to write". The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on magic. Generally, messages will appear to be something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other covertext and, classically, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter. (Wikipedia)
Stenganography should be compared with encryption, coding and encoding (“codage” in French).
In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information (referred to as plaintext) using an algorithm (called a cipher) to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information (in cryptography, referred to as ciphertext). In many contexts, the word encryption also implicitly refers to the reverse process, decryption (e.g. “software for encryption” can typically also perform decryption), to make the encrypted information readable again (i.e. to make it unencrypted).(Wikipedia)
For an Encryption glossary see the link provided here.
Stegnagraphy has been around since ancient times, in one form or another. A Greek named Histaiaeus shaved the head of a slave, tattooed a message on his scalp, and then waited until his hair grew back to send him on his way. The recipients of the message shaved the slave’s head again to see the message. Conspiracy theorists maintain that crop circles are a similar trick—an encoded message from aliens (or pranksters) that disappears once the barley grows back.
The present spy case shines light on this ancient science.
Were alleged Russian spies undone by technology problems?
To read 456 pages on this and related subject, see Disappearing Cryptography: Information Hiding, Steganography and Watermarking, by Peter Wayner.
For a shorter (1/2 a page) , more humorous article on the current spy scandal, read Looking Back, That Did Seem a Little Suspicious in the New York Times –
For John Le Carre’s classic spy thriller, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, see here
The French version, L’espion qui venait du froid, is available at Amazon.fr
The French word is stéganographie. This is to be contrasted with crytographie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography