I've been playing with steganography.  Never heard of it?  Neither had I until recently.  It's a fancy word that means something fairly simple: hiding information inside picture or music files.  And not just hiding information, but hiding the fact that information is being hidden.

Confused?  Suppose you are a human rights activist in a repressive country somewhere.  You collect eye-witness accounts of government brutality, complete with names of perpetrators and victims, and you wish to forward the information to, say, Amnesty International, or to any of thousands of groups present and future, so that the criminals can be brought to justice, and their abuses ended.

You have a problem: Your government is watching every byte you send.

There are programs like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) which will scramble the data, but it's still obvious to whomever's watching that hidden data is being sent.  Expect a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Enter steganography.  You send a friend, who can connect to the target organization, a photo of the tree in front of your house, or of your vacation on the beach, or whatever.  The picture looks normal, but hidden inside is the information you wish to convey.  Your friend runs a special program, enters a password, and - BAM! - the hidden data pops out.  Anyone who doesn't have the special program, or who doesn't know the correct password, sees only the photo, or a random stream of digital dust if he tries to extract additional info.

Pretty neat, eh?  I sure think it is.  Of course, I live in the U.S., the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, and would never, ever need such software.  Right?

Wrong.  Or so I fear.  Bush, Ashcroft, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the whole gang in Washington, are extremely paranoid these days.  The average citizen is at least under suspicion of being an Enemy of the People, or rather, an Enemy of the State.  If you want to do anything outside the omnipresent gaze of the government, that's even more suspicious.

As an aside, let us ask, why are our government officials so paranoid?  Is it because of mountains of evidence of genuine terrorist threats within the borders of the United States?  Not hardly.  They're not quite as stupid as they seem, however, because there ARE genuine threats to the regime, in the form of bright spotlights being shown on their machinations and lies.  And did I mention incompetence?  These guys are paranoid for good reason; that's the one thing about them that actually makes some sense.  It also makes them even more dangerous than they would otherwise be.

Thus, steganography has the promise of being a force for good in the world.  There's a fly in the ointment, however.  Real photos (or music files, if one uses them instead) are less random without hidden data than they are with hidden data added.  Why?  The real world, whether image or music, has curves that are softer than the jangly random bits which are encoded in their place.  It is difficult to disguise the difference.

And so, steganography's cover is blown, potentially: I send my friend a normal-looking photo, but careful analysis reveals that it has more randomness than an undoctored photo would be likely to have.  Government goons take notice, and nasty results follow.

Luckily, there's a way around the problem: Add some random data to photos whether or not they contain hidden information.  This can actually have an artistic effect: I'm looking at a picture taken just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, in which I've replaced fully 3/4 of the original data with random bits.  There remain only 64 distinct colors, plus the underlying random numbers, which give a slight graininess to a posterized version of the image.  It's really quite lovely! 

(Replacing 3/4 of the data is extreme.  The visual effect becomes negligible as the ratio falls below about 1/2.  It's just a question of how much information one wishes to embed.)

If many of us started adding random data to our photos before we e-mail or post them, detecting the presence of steganographic additions would become virtually impossible.  It is extremely difficult to distinguish between truly random bits and pseudo-random bits which contain embedded information.

Which is a problem for the powers that be.  They don't like us communicating privately amongst ourselves.  They don't like us hiding the fact that we MIGHT be communicating privately.

Therefore, it is my prediction that an upcoming act, named something like USASafeNow, demanded by a fear-mongering president, passed by a complicit Congress, and supported by 56% of the populace (when the question is carefully put), will outlaw the introduction of random data into images or music.  Random numbers will become, in effect, illegal to possess or distribute.  As dangerous as marijuana, or even more so!

Of course, I'm being absurd, ridiculous.  The government would NEVER stoop to such a crazy prohibition.  Right?