How to hide text from NSA's automated surveillance

July 07, 2013

Thanks to Edward Snowden and others, we know that the National Security Agency is listening. But what if we spoke in a language we could understand but they couldn’t? What if we wrote in a typeface we could read but would look like gibberish to the NSA’s massive supercomputers? That’s the puzzle Sang Mun set out to solve. During his two years in the Sourth Korean military, Mun worked as a contractor for the NSA, extracting information from intelligence intercepts. He’s also a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. So Mung designed a typeface that can be deciphered by humans, but not by the optical character recognition software employed by spy agencies to rapidly scan billions of documents as they fly across the InterWebs. The typeface, called ZXX, inserts artifacts and extraneous bits of information that our brains can easily filter out, but machines can’t (at least, not yet). Some versions of ZXX can be scanned by OCR, some can’t. For example, the text at the top of the graphic at the left is composed in ZXX Combination and not computer readable. The text immediately below is written in ZXX Bold, which can be read by machines and humans alike. Walker Art Center/The GradientThe top text is composed in ZXX Combination and not computer readable; below, the text is in ZXX Bold, readable by OCR and people. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043342/how-to-hide-text-from-nsas-automated-surveillance.html#tk.rss_all