<nettime> "Pirate Utopia," FEED, February 20, 2001

["Julian Dibbell" <jmdibbell@home.com>]

Key concepts: steganography, encryption, Osama bin Laden, intellectual
property, temporary autonomous zone, pirates.

Attention conservation notice: It's 3300 words that I wrote 7 months ago for
the late, lamented FEED. In retrospect, it's possibly a little too
lighthearted about the wiles of terrorism and a little too gloomy about the
demise of Napster. But it's timely again, I think, all the same. Especially
in light of the 9/11-inspired crackdown on crypto.


FEED 02.20.01

PIRATE UTOPIA
What does Osama bin Laden's Web porn infiltration have to do with Napster's
fight for life? Julian Dibbell connects the microdots.

Two weeks ago USAToday broke the shocking news that Osama bin Laden's
terrorist organization has infiltrated the world's supply of Web porn,
hiding messages for its global operatives deep within the digits of pictures
posted on Godless Western triple-X sites. For historically minded readers,
the article afforded a moment of wonder at the depths of the
national-security establishment's Cold War nostalgia and the media's
willingness to indulge it. There was the old familiar intimacy of the
alleged subversion, the thrilling suggestion that the enemy might lurk among
us everywhere, sneaking into our bedrooms and our cubicles under cover of
cultural trash. "You very well could have a photograph and image with the
time and information of an attack sitting on your computer, and you would
never know it," one cyberwar expert told USAToday's reporter.

I confess, though, that I got a bit nostalgic myself when I read the story.
Not for the Cold War -- I was born too late to enjoy it in the fullness of
its Eisenhowerian heyday -- but for its Bush-era aftermath. Specifically, I
found myself looking back with melancholy fondness upon the summer of 1992,
a moment perhaps not equal to the summer of '67 in its hold on the memories
of a generation but one which for me, at least, holds much the same sense of
freedom and promise in the bubble of its recollection. It was a moment,
after all, when radical political thought was just beginning to adjust to
the reality of '89, just rising to the challenge of imagining the
possibilities that that reality implied. It was a moment, as well, when the
Internet, long a distant, reverie-inspiring rumor known firsthand only to
military contractors and computer-science majors, was just starting to enter
the lives of the rest of us. But most importantly, perhaps, and certainly
not at all coincidentally, it was the moment when I first learned it was
possible to do with digital communications what Osama bin Laden is now
reported to have done.

+++

The technical name for it is steganography, from the Greek for "covered
writing." It is the art of keeping communications undetected, and it is not
to be confused with the related discipline of cryptography. Cryptography
assumes that messages will be intercepted and uses codes and ciphers to make
sure they can't be understood if they are. But steganography aims for a
deeper sort of cover: it assumes that if the message is so much as found to
exist, the game is over.

Steganographic techniques are as old, at least, as Herodotus, who documented
their use among the Greeks of the 5th century B.C. In Book Seven of _The
Histories_, he writes that when Demaratus, a Spartan living in Persia, got
wind of the emperor Xerxes' plan to invade Greece, he contrived to tip his
compatriots off by sending them a stegotext: he took a pair of folding
wooden message tablets, scraped the wax writing surface off them, wrote his
message on the wood, then covered his message back over with wax. Persian
counterintelligence never suspected a thing. Nor did the Persians have a
clue when Histiaeus of Miletus sent a similarly subversive letter home
tattooed onto the scalp of a trusted slave. The messenger arrived safely at
his destination and said no more than what he'd been instructed to say:
"Shave my head and look thereon."

In contrast with cryptography, a field long given over to high math and
puzzle-making abstraction, steganography was always more or less a materials
science, its history florid with the range of substances and gadgetry used
at one time or another to conceal communications. Simon Singh's _The Code
Book_ relates that in the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder explained how
the milk of the thithymallus plant dried to transparency when applied to
paper but darkened to brown when subsequently heated, thus recording one of
the earliest recipes for invisible ink. The ancient Chinese wrote notes on
small pieces of silk that they then wadded into little balls and coated in
wax, to be swallowed by a messenger and retrieved, I guess, at the messenger
's gastrointestinal convenience. The 16th century Italian scientist Giovanni
Porta proposed a steganographic scheme involving hard-boiled eggs: write on
the shell with a vinegar-and-alum solution and your message passes through
to the surface of the egg white, where it can't be read until the shell is
peeled away.

In the 1860s, the technology of microfilm was perfected, ushering in a
golden age of stealth that reached its manic peak in World War II, when
German spies began making heavy use of the microdot. A page of text shrunk
down to a one-millimeter speck of film, the microdot could be pasted almost
indetectably into any humdrum business letter, hiding out in the shallow
well of a typewritten period or comma. With swarms of them passing through
the mails, the U.S. government went a sort of nuts and started seeing hidden
messages everywhere. By the end of the war, censors had either prohibited or
tampered with flower deliveries, commercial-radio song requests, broadcast
weather reports, postal chess games, children's drawings on their way to
Grandma, knitting instructions, and anything else that might too easily
encode Axis intelligence. At one point, an entire shipment of watches was
held up so officials could spin the dials and wipe out any messages hidden
in the positions of the hands.

In the half century since the war, however, the sweeping digitization of
communications tech has caused steganography at last to veer away from the
material world, joining cryptography in the realms of math and abstraction.
As ever, of course, information still reaches the mind in the form of
concrete sensory stimuli -- as light and sound -- but increasingly it is the
universal code of binary numbers that shapes that information, and it is in
the numbers that hackers and spooks have looked for places to hide still
more information.

They have found those places. Digital stego takes a number of forms, but
most of them are variations on the most popular technique (the one most
likely to be used by bin Laden and company, in fact, if they are really
using any at all). It's called "least significant bit" steganography, and to
understand how it works, you have to think a little about how digital media
work. Consider the dots of light that compose an image on a computer screen.
Or the slivers of sound that blend together to form a song as it streams
from a CD player. Each dot, each sliver, is recorded as a small number of
bits -- ones and zeroes -- maybe 16 of them, maybe 24. Most of the bits
specify crucial information about the color or tone of the sensory blip they
represent, but a few stand for nuances the average eye or ear won't even
pick up. These latter, the so-called least significant bits (LSBs), are
effectively indistinguishable from noise -- from the random hiss and blur
that shows up in any information channel. And since properly encrypted data
is also indistinguishable from noise, then it turns out that an untouched
digital copy of a song or photograph is very hard to tell from a copy whose
LSBs have been overwritten with a well-enciphered message. The collected
LSBs of a Radiohead CD, for instance, might encode a completely undetectable
blueprint of the Stealth bomber. This sentence might fit imperceptibly
inside a small JPEG image embedded in a Web page somewhere.

Indeed, *this* sentence actually does fit inside a small JPEG image on a Web
page somewhere -- the one directly to the left of this paragraph, to be
precise. It's in there right now, braided into the bits with the aid of a
free stego program I downloaded just the other day, called Jsteg.

Or maybe it isn't.

And how would you ever know?

+++

I first learned what digital steganography was, as I said, in 1992. I
learned it from a man named Timothy C. May, a 40-year-old microchip
physicist who had retired from Intel a wealthy man several years earlier.
May was soon to land on the cover of Wired magazine's debut issue as one of
the founding members of the Cypherpunks, a mostly online collective of
mostly hardcore technolibertarians united to promote the spread of digital
encryption tools in what was then just beginning to be called cyberspace.
Cryptography was itself about to hit a sort of big time. In mid 1993 the
freshly elected Clinton administration would make its mark on technological
history by announcing a new digital encryption standard, Clipper, equipped
with an FBI-accessible back door aimed at heading off precisely what the
Cypherpunks aimed to achieve: the complete invulnerability of private
electronic communications to government surveillance.

Grippingly chronicled in Steven Levy's new history of digital-age
encryption, _Crypto_, the resulting political struggle between Clipper's
backers at the FBI, CIA, and NSA, on the one hand, and a coalition of
hackers, civil liberties advocates, and software industrialists, on the
other, became the Internet's first great privacy crisis -- and arguably
never ended. Today's Cypherpunk diehards, for instance, mostly dismissed the
recent news about Bin Laden's porn habit as yet another attempt by the
Three-Letter Agencies to soften up the populace for restrictions on crypto,
and they may well have been right. Though the TLAs long ago lost the Clipper
battle (unbreakable crypto has become the infrastructural backbone of
e-commerce), their panic-mongering pronouncements on terrorists' use of
crypto suggests they may not have given up hopes of winning the war.

But back in the summer of '92, all that was future history. Cryptography was
still just an obscurely fascinating field I had read about in an old
paperback I'd picked up secondhand (David Kahn's crypto-history bible, _The
Codebreakers_), and Tim May was just a guy whose obscurely fascinating
remarks on the subject I had come across on my local bulletin board's Usenet
feed. Out of professional curiosity, I got him on the phone one day and didn
't get off for another 45 minutes, during which time I did very little of
the talking. "When Tim May thought about crypto," writes Levy in his chapter
on the Cypherpunks, "it was almost like dropping acid" -- and when he
*talked* about crypto it was almost like you'd drunk from the same spiked
punch bowl. He conjured visions of a world in which entire virtual
communities disappeared into the dark freedom of impenetrable privacy. A
world in which all markets were black, untaxable, and in which the tyranny
of the nation-state therefore withered inexorably away. A world always just
beneath the surface of this one but at the same time light-years distant,
safe behind a wall of math so thick even the NSA's most powerful computers
could never crunch through it.

"You can get further away in cyberspace than you could in going to Alpha
Centauri," May told me. "Some of these things sound like just a bunch of
fucking numbers, but what they really are is they're things which in
computability space take more energy to get to than to drive a car to
Andromeda."

In a certain light, of course, May's prophecies were just an extreme form of
sci-fi geekdom and really not quite my cup of Kool-Aid. As it turned out
(and as I should not have been surprised to learn), May was an energetic
adept of Extropianism, a scientistic California semi-cult devoted to Ayn
Rand, immortality through cryogenics, and the Gnostic dream of uploading
human consciousness into computers -- all of which was a bit much to swallow
for a club-hopping young New Yorker still tipsy on the soft-Marxist politics
and anti-positivist literary theory he'd imbibed in college.

And yet at its core May's "crypto anarchist" vision (his phrase) resonated
deeply with some of the latest wrinkles in soft Marxism and literary
anti-positivism coming out of the theory mills. In particular, it seemed
almost to have taken direct inspiration from Hakim Bey's lively
anarcho-Baudrillardian classic _The Temporary Autonomous Zone_, a then
recently published tract celebrating not the final utopias yearned for in
traditional radicalism but the brief liberatory grace of failed uprisings,
transient communes, excellent parties, and other carnivalesque moments
smuggled out from under the controlling gaze of the state. Itself inspired
by the shadow history of "pirate utopias" -- tropical island havens of
democratic lawlessness to which 18th century buccaneers repaired between
bouts of bloody economic parasitism -- Hakim Bey's notion of the temporary
autonomous zone, or TAZ, embraced with guarded enthusiasm the possibility of
virtual outlaw colonies taking quiet shape amid the burgeoning connections
of the world's computer networks. "Islands in the Net," Bey called them, hip
enough to borrow the phrase from arch-cyberpunk Bruce Sterling's latest
novel.

As it happens, _The Temporary Autonomous Zone_ has just been republished by
the MIT Press in _Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias_, an
anthology of essays on "emerging political structures in cyberspace" that
includes a couple of Tim May's visionary rants as well. But it didn't take
that juxtaposition for me to see the connection. The way I heard it on the
phone that day nine years ago, May's project was really just a more
pragmatic version of Bey's -- an attempt to frame the prospects for online
autonomous zones in the only discursive terms Net culture had ever really
respected: rough consensus and running code. May laid a whole shopping list
of cool hacks and peer-to-peer conspiracies on me -- anonymous remailers,
untraceable e-cash, zero-knowledge markets in corporate secrets, pirated
software, and murder contracts -- and each one grabbed my attention like he
was telling me the precise date and channel the revolution would be
televised on.

But curiously, none of them captured my imagination like a certain very cool
but essentially minor hack he mentioned toward the end of our conversation,
almost in passing. The hack was LSB stego, and only now, having seen in the
pages of USAToday how the very thought of it affects grown national-security
experts, can I quite articulate what so thrilled me about it back then. It
was the idea that any piece of information I came across on the Net might
secretly hold within it yet another piece, which for that matter might
contain another one in its turn, and so on and on. It was the way this idea
seemed itself to contain all the headiest meanings swirling through that
historical moment -- the way it metaphorized both Tim May's and Hakim Bey's
schemes for hiding micro-utopias beneath the surface of the social. The way
it literalized how pregnant with possible futures the post-Cold War world
had become and the Net was then becoming. The way it even somehow
conceptually resembled the iconic cybercultural image of the day -- the
fractal Mandelbrot set, with its levels within levels of intricately chaotic
structure, swirling psychedelically on a million dorm-room computer screens
like so many digital-age lava lamps, blowing minds the same way Tim May had
just blown mine.

It was stego. And it was so -- I can't think how else to put it -- so very
1992.

+++

These days, steganography is not very 1992 at all -- and needless to say,
neither are these days.

The moment when the Net could serve as an empty screen to project dreams of
radical autonomy onto has long since passed. Already in 1995, old-school
net.evangelist John Perry Barlow was drawing snickers from the
post-soft-Marxist set for his "Declaration of the Independence of
Cyberspace," a classic bit of mailing-list bluster that proclaimed to the
governments of the industrial world ("you weary giants of flesh and steel")
that their laws and their intellectual-property regimes held no sovereignty
over "Cyberspace, the new home of Mind." Nowadays, the snickerers would
probably find it a balm to be able to entertain the fantasy for just a
moment or two, but at this point that is surely beyond the powers of even
Barlow's expansive imagination.

And as for those intellectual-property regimes -- let's just say that if
ever there was a genuine pirate utopia online, it was Napster, and that if
ever there was an online equivalent to the appearance of His Majesty's
gunships in the waters off the last genuine pirate utopia before that --
Blackbeard's beachfront shantytown at Nassau in the Bahamas -- it was the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judgment last week effectively handing
Napster's azz to the record industry. It's probably too soon to predict with
any precision the future of Napster's 58-million-member "community," but
anyone planning on giving it a shot could do worse than look for precedent
in the Nassau colony's overnight collapse at the first appearance of the
Law. "Blackbeard and 'Calico Jack' Rackham and his crew of pirate women
moved on to wilder shores and nastier fates," writes Hakim Bey in one of the
gloomier moments of his _TAZ_, "while others meekly accepted the Pardon and
reformed."

In the midst of all these less-than-thrilling changes, steganography, sadly
and ironically enough, remains a mirror of its times. Rumors of terrorist
applications notwithstanding, the majority of interest in steganographic
techniques these days comes not from criminal and/or libertarian hackers
looking for virtual hidey-holes but from corporate researchers looking for a
way to put digital locks on intellectual property. It turns out stego's
pretty good for that: by weaving encrypted copyright information and serial
numbers into the binary code of photos, songs, and movies, rights owners can
sear a sort of virtual brand into their property. These digital watermarks,
as they're called, have the usefully paired qualities of being (a) difficult
to erase and (b) easy to trace. Some watermark schemes haunting the research
journals propose sending mark-hunting Web spiders out to troll for content
pirates and ID them for prosecution. At least one imagines fleets of
radio-sensitive vans cruising urban business districts, scanning for
stego-marked elecromagnetic emissions that would give away the presence of
pirated software in nearby offices.

Whether any of these plans will take hold in the real world remains to be
seen -- and may be beside the point. As in '92, so in '01 it's not so much
the quality of the tech as the quality of the dreams behind the tech that
give the tenor of the times. And if pirate-chasing stego systems is where
the dreams lie these days, then the times they are depressing.

And yet I can't help hoping. The anarcho-visionary energy of the Cypherpunk
movement may have dissipated -- siphoned off into the mundane importance of
making the world safe for online credit-card transactions -- but here and
there imaginative hackers are still drawn to stego. They code their cool
little apps: the aforementioned Jsteg, which hides data in JPEGs, and
MP3Stego, which does the same with MP3s. There is Snow, which embeds
information in the white space of text documents. And the hilarious Spam
Mimic, which translates brief messages into the semi-coherent raving of
junk-e-mail-speak. They're so much fun, these programs, that I suppose it's
possible that fun is really all they're about. And yet, all the same, their
presence makes me suspect there's still an urge out there to drop off the
radar, to find that dark freedom Tim May used to rant about.

And it inspires my own little dream: that somewhere, someone out there has
embedded the text of Bey's _Temporary Autonomous Zone_ in an album's worth
of Metallica MP3s and thrown it up on Napster, thereby both flipping the
bird to the RIAA and at the same time, by ineradicably marking his own
connection to an act of piracy, daring them to come after him. I'd do it
myself if I were hacker enough. Or more to the point, if I didn't prefer the
fantasy that someone out there had the idea before me. I mean, I'd like to
think I'm not the only one still wishing it was the summer of '92.

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