Good evening,
We had the rain, and thunderstorms, that were forecast previously for our area. There was a tornado report in the Village of Cambria, about fifty miles north of Whitewater. A tornado that touched down in June near Old World Wisconsin, of Eagle, Wisconsin caused considerable damage, as a story at the GazetteXtra.com describes. (See, Old World Wisconsin Looks for New Life After Tornado.)
I wrote a week ago about how odd it seemed that no one noticed more quickly that the Russian spies in their midst were, in fact, Russian (and not, for example, Belgians as one of them claimed). See, Does Anyone Remember The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming? One reads all sorts of stories about how incompetent these Russians were, but if that’s true, what does that say about how long it took to identify them?
Ars Technica‘s published a story entitled, “How even the dumbest Russian spies can outwit the NSA,” that shows not all of their methods were foolish:
But as incompetent as these spies were, they were bright enough to at least partially outwit the large-scale e-mail snooping efforts of the NSA’s backbone taps and multibillion-dollar datacenters. How? By using steganography to encode secret text messages in image files, which they then placed on websites.
After searching one spy’s apartment, law enforcement agents found a computer and made a copy of its hard drive for later analysis. On the hard drive they found an address book containing website links, which the agents visited and downloaded images from.
The complaint notes that “these images appear wholly unremarkable to the naked eye. But these images (and others) have been analyzed using the Steganography Program. As a result of this analysis, some of the images have been revealed as containing readable text files.”
The steganography program used to decode the images was also on one of the hard drives copied in the search; it was this hard drive which was password protected, and which the agents were able to unlock because the 27-character password was written down on a piece of paper and left lying out in the open on a desk. Clearly, the spies would have been better off with a much shorter password that could have been memorized versus a too-long one that they had to write down and keep nearby.
But “don’t write down your passwords” and “don’t pick passwords that you have to write down” are the two least interesting lessons to draw from the spies’ comical ineptitude. The deeper lesson is that, however dumb these spies were, the real joke here is on US taxpayers.
This technique of using steganography to hide messages in images published online isn’t particularly brilliant, and it’s simple enough to execute that these apparent nincompoops could manage it. Yet our government spends tens of billions of dollars on networking monitoring hardware and data-mining efforts that are aimed at vacuuming up our electronic communications and automatically parsing them for terrorist-speak. All of this technology would fail to detect the messages that these spies sent—either their contents or the simple fact of their existence. The Russian spies’ online messaging activity would look to any automated system like perfectly normal HTTP traffic.
Surprise at others’ sloppiness shouldn’t distract us from our own limitations.
Petacchi won another stage victory in the Tour, and Cancellara remains in yellow. I saw that at Bicycling‘s live coverage of stage four, there was some clucking about how the announcers at Versus won’t stop talking. (Bill Strickland: “And we’re living with Versus coverage of all the talking that goes on inside the broadcast booth. They will cut to the race action from time to time, which is a great disappointment to all of us who can’t get enough of the broadcaster’s competition to see who picks the winner.”)
Oh my. I am sure that the Versus coverage leaves much to be desired. If Versus talks to much, has it occurred to Strickland and his Bicycling colleagues that they write too much? Strickland is, after all, the author of a fan book called — wait for it — Tour de Lance, and his successor as editor-in-chief of Bicycling, Loren Mooney, had to apologize in the August issue of Bicycling for believing Floyd Landis’s lies, and for writing a book about how he was supposedly a victim of false accusations. (A defense that fell apart when Landis belatedly admitted what had been proven far earlier. See Mooney’s mea culpa, “The Lies I Wrote.”)
At least Mooney’s apology has a straightforward and honest title. It might prove profitable to her, in new ways, too. She might consider licensing that stark headline for use by municipal bureaucrats — she’d have another income, and a tidy one at that.