An example showing how terrorists may use forum avatars to send hidden messages. This avatar contains the message "Boss said that we should blow up the bridge at midnight."
Cryptography is the art of hiding information; before the modern era this was synonymous with encryption, the rendering of information from a legible state to an unreadable one.
With the recent exposing of a secret Russian spy ring in the U.S. (still using, it seems, Rocky & Bullwinkle techniques) there has been a fresh round of popular interest in steganography as well. You might recall the unconfirmed speculations that embedded within Ebay images were secret messages to Al-Qaeda operatives.
Deleuze & Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, state that overcoding is the expression of capitalism par excellence. It is the parsing of code and overlaying of more coding that gives capital it’s quasi-magical powers to makes all objects commensurable with all other objects. I like how Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid) approached the term (from the webtake of his book Rhythm Science):
“Encoding. What comes to mind when you say the word? Whether its written or spoken, several meanings come to mind and in turn lead you down other paths of meaning — no fixed points come into perspective, no key opens the cryptographic realms of the word to penetration. One simply uses the word to refer to a process.”
Image created by Dr. Neil F. Johnson (1995)
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