https://archive.org/details/advancementofl00baco/page/254/mo...
> "For if a letter should come into the hands of such as have a power over the writer or receiver, though the cipher itself be trusty and impossible to decipher, it is still subject to examination and question, unless there be no room to suspect or examine it."
I doubt many slaves' heads were shorn looking for messages (and if they had been, the eavesdropping would be, as in QE, obvious), but overlong images are begging to be flagged by a linter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24341108 , and anyone who naively stuffs plaintext there should hope no one ever runs strings(1).
Anyway, as mentioned above, I don't care if the general case is called steganography, I'm just curious what then the specific case (of writing that has a "cover story") would be called?
There's obviously a spectrum of how hidden the message is. e.g. tacking bytes onto the end of the image blob vs encoding your message by inc/decrementing rgba values away from the original.
The former is trivial to remove in this case (can just diff images with different messages or run the image through an optimizer), the latter is impossible to remove though you can ruin the encoded message, but surely they both check the high level definitions of steganography.