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Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by LoganCale on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:03PM (#5887259)
Just to be clear, this is a fictional scenario demonstrating a potential absurd situation that could arise from dragnet surveillance.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by ary on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:42PM (#5887367)
Spoilers ahead

To be even more clear it appears to draw inspiration from various works of political fiction. Notably the "love" for authority figures towards the end smacks of Winston's transformation in '1984'.

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by aasarava on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:55PM (#5887405)
Also, O'Brien is the agent in 1984.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by auxbuss on Sunday June 16, 2013 @06:20AM (#5888022)
And Bloom is the protagonist of Ulysses.

It's also Bloomsday today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by anthuswilliams on Sunday June 16, 2013 @03:10PM (#5889500)
I have not read Ulysses, so the story had me thinking about Bloom filters, data structures for which the likelihood of false positives increase as the dataset grows larger. I guess there is a certain kind of poetry in the coincidence.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by Houshalter on Sunday June 16, 2013 @01:24AM (#5887550)
Ya I was thinking about the scary irony of being interviewed by a man named O'Brien. But since I assumed it was real, I thought it was just a coincidence. And in hindsight, a lot of details of the story don't make sense, but that it could be fiction just didn't cross my mind.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by Filligree on Sunday June 16, 2013 @08:39AM (#5888254)
"I learned about PRISM two years ago". ;-)

Now, if you read that in 2015, you might have a case.

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by avsbst on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:20PM (#5887291)
Seems like he's claiming it's fact -- https://twitter.com/johnsifton/status/345864867946827777

Do you have any proof it's fictional writing?

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by A1kmm on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:41PM (#5887361)
I think it is deliberately written to be a little too absurd to be plausible.

In real life, if you are accused of hiding information in a well known text, you could just show that your version of the text exactly matches the original, and so there is no scope for hiding information.

Instead, the protagonist, with his lawyer's encouragement, study secondary texts on the interpretation of the text and work with the FBI to help them understand a poem someone else wrote?

It is very Kafkaesque, but also plainly obvious that it is fiction (I also started reading it with the expectation of a true story rather than fiction).

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by a3n on Sunday June 16, 2013 @12:11AM (#5887431)
There are at least two ways of hiding information here: how much of the text to send in one go, and the time the text is sent. You could vary both to signal information about something, even though the text doesn't lead directly to any message.

A green flare is shot into the air at 11pm. Or, two green flares are shot. That's a pre-agreed signal that something did happen, something will happen or something should happen.

A paragraph is sent on August 2nd. Or, two paragraphs ...

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by Houshalter on Sunday June 16, 2013 @01:21AM (#5887543)
Yes but that's a very limited amount of information, maybe only a few bits. Seems like a pretty inefficient way of hiding such a small message.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by tomjen3 on Sunday June 16, 2013 @07:46AM (#5888177)
If you send between 1 and 4 paragraphs from one of four different works, a day, it doesn't take that long to send the 2048 bytes necessary to create a public key, or the 512 necessary to give the hash of one.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by hosay123 on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:57PM (#5887411)
Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but..

> In real life, if you are accused of hiding information in a well known text, you could just show that your version of the text exactly matches the original, and so there is no scope for hiding information.

Except a pre-agreed set of excerpts in a particular order forms a codebook, and the order in which they are delivered easily becomes a code. The code's symbols need not just be excepts, but some combobulation involving the position of the excerpt in the source text, length of quotation, etc. etc

Picking a random book from Project Gutenberg, War and Peace has almost 12,000 paragraphs going by the HTML version. That's enough to encode one and a half words from any of the 235k entries in OS X /usr/share/dict words with just 2 quoted paragraphs

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by caf on Sunday June 16, 2013 @12:15AM (#5887438)
You're supposed to go in with the expectation of a true story, and part of the commentary of this piece is exactly where you become certain that it's fiction.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by girvo on Sunday June 16, 2013 @12:41AM (#5887477)
What tipped it off for me, was his "transformation" at the end. Until that point though, I assumed it was a true story.

And that scares the shit out of me.

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by selftorture on Sunday June 16, 2013 @01:44AM (#5887584)
"I will not acknowledge, however, that my actions were illegal." - See more at: http://warscapes.com/literature/cryptogams-nsa#sthash.9XxIjY... copyright anyone?
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by sses on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:24PM (#5887299)
He's joking. From the front page of warscapes.com: "What does the NSA make of James Joyce? The author finds out the hard way in his imagined brush with US intelligence over the PRISM data-mining program..."
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by aaron695 on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:23PM (#5887295)
I would certainly agree this would seem to be the case, but the article is not too clear on that.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by LoganCale on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:26PM (#5887305)
The front page of the site makes it clear, with the word "imagined".
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by aaron695 on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:44PM (#5887370)
Got it.

Certainly his twitter seemed to say the opposite.

What didn't add up to me is A. Prism could track these emails. B. It would trip it off

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by mtraven on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:36PM (#5887345)
The "Special Agents O’Brien and Bloom" kind of gave it away.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by alexqgb on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:40PM (#5887359)
"What is the code? What does this say in plain English? This ‘selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless?’ – what is this shit?”
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by olefoo on Sunday June 16, 2013 @12:53AM (#5887495)
You should spend some time with english majors.

Finnegans Wake is sort of the literary equivalent of The Art Of Computer Programming, widely admired, seldom read, rarely understood.

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by thret on Sunday June 16, 2013 @02:00AM (#5887613)
I devoured AoCP in three months, Finnegans Wake took a year and a half. I have a compulsive need to finish reading what I start and it just sucked the life out of me. Ulysses is a masterpiece, but I wouldn't recommend Wake to anyone. There are still some gems but most of it is simply painful to read.

-- Lines from Wake that actually make sense:

It was folded by cunning, sealed by crime, uptied by a harlot, undone by a child. It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art?

Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?

Shake eternity and lick creation.

Erning his breadth to the swelt of his proud.

Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by alexqgb on Sunday June 16, 2013 @02:03AM (#5887619)
Oh I know. I just thought it was hilarious to see Finnegans Wake being described as so impenetrable that even cryptologists at the NSA couldn't crack it.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by selftorture on Sunday June 16, 2013 @01:03AM (#5887514)
<A HREF="http://www.gerardmanleyhopkins.org/lectures_2001/imagery.htm... sucks</A>, though you can have as much rope as you need.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction) by Oculus on Sunday June 16, 2013 @11:54AM (#5888805)
None the less, a really interesting read.