USAF Wants To Find Steganographic Content

Bud Higgins writes "The U.S. Air Force has posted a Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) solicitation in which they seek proposals for the automated detection of steganographic content. They seek an application that should run both unobtrusively in the background and in a manual mode, and provide the user the capability to scan all email attachments, downloaded materials and accessed files with an appropriate steganalysis algorithm, reporting any abnormal results (i.e. the presence of steganography). I personally don't think that is feasible, but maybe a good programmer can prove me wrong. A link to the solicitation AF04-T008 can be found here. For those who are not familiar with the SBIR/STTR program, it provides up to $850k for 3 years of research." This sounds very similar to what Niels Provos did over a several-year period at University of Michigan's CITI and released under a free license. I hope the USAF doesn't spend too much of my money without considering extending that research.

Comments

It's not "your money"

[oobar]

I hope the USAF doesn't spend too much of my money without considering extending that research.

Sorry to break it to you but taxpayer dollars are not "your money." It ceases to be yours when you pay taxes. Otherwise, I would be able to say, "No, you can't build that road, I won't allow it since it's my money that you're using." It's part of the implicit social contract between government and its citizens: The people recognise that there are certain things that require public funding for the good of everyone, and so grant our elected representatives the right to decide how to use that money. You have control over it insomuch as you can vote for your representatives and in referendums, but you cannot take the attitude that you get to control where every dollar that you pay in taxes goes. If that were the case then nothing would ever get done, because projects are -always- beneficial to some people and worthless to others. If people could say e.g. "No, you can't use my tax money to build that school as I don't have kids and so I'm not getting anything out of it" or "No, I don't want my tax dollars going into road construction, I don't even own a car" then there would be no schools, no roads, no public facilities, etc. So, yes, you are certainly entitled to have a say in how tax dollars are spent, but it's in the context of your representative or through voter initiatives, and not on the basis of "that's my money you're spending there."

Why is it so fashionable in the US

[BillsPetMonkey]

To dream up technical solutions (OK, ideas) for human problems? Is it to do with the US's yearning to regain it's position on the top of the technology R&D tree?

Doesn't this latest research grant smack of a Bush-backed "We want an all-encompassing system to catch bad people. Oh and we reckon stenography is the answer too."

Re:US Gov sponsored DRM

[DigiShaman]

"I'm glad people like you are rarely put in a position to make important decisions."

Exactly, I'm much to intelligent (and moral) to be allowed into goverment. Only Morons get elected due to the vast number of sheep in this country such as your self Mr AC.