Comment by TheDong
14 days ago
Clever technological tricks are not the solution to political problems.
"Plausible deniability" is cute, but in practice, who cares?
> impossible to convict someone over it.
Yeah, sure, tell me how well that works for you. "Your honor, the data is mathematically indistinguishable from random bytes so you can't convict me" -> "The witness saw you type in a password to view data from that image, give us the password or you're going to prison. Even if you don't give us the passphrase, the police officer says you might be using something called 'steganography', and that's already enough to convict you"
The court and legal system does not care about clever logical tricks or cryptographic tricks or any of that.
When you've been observed doing something (esp with evidence), "plausible deniability" falls through.
But when you haven't (eg. if you had your data that way in an Apple Cloud, and Apple was required to provide blanket access to everything), nobody can come and claim you've got there anything other than videos.
Obviously, a sufficiently motivated actor won't be stopped (see torture), but your data is not out in the open.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/
As I responded in a sibling comment, that is true when you are being targeted: for blanket surveillance of innocent citizens, it will work wonders.
The problem with just doing encryption is that it can be made illegal and it's obvious when you are using it with a cloud platform. The same is true for steganography (you can make it illegal), but someone would have to know you are using it to apply the same tactic.
Oh absolutely, I once saw research exploring how terrorist groups were using World of Warcraft emotes as their steganography and I show my students how to do simple least significant bit hiding when I teach them about image processing.
Unless you know for a fact someone is using hidden communication its near impossible to discern in the wild.