No evidence presented other than easily faked screenshot. Crowd goes wild.

Pass.

At a minimum, an independent link to image and the URL for the image on the Post's website should be easily found. Neither are.

My guess is that this is either a false positive by outguess or something embedded by NY Post meant for internal use.

Edit: outguess is finding binary data in the file, but the binary data is 57643 bytes, far larger than a PGP key. outguess 0.13 supposedly finds a smaller payload... Yeah my guess is just false positive.

Why #EpsteinStegoSaurus? What could the PGP key being embedded mean?

Interesting to see this go from the front page to well past 100 in only a few minutes.

My question: who was looking, and why? Is someone really checking every image on NY Post/other media sites for steganographically embedded data, or were they acting on a tip off? This whole thing looks extremely odd.

This is very much an extraordinary claim and IMO is entirely without merit.

For those who do not know anything about steganography, it is the science of hiding messages in the 'noise' of a carrier file. The carrier file is most commonly an image or a video. Since image and video files are so large, and the eye cannot detect minor differences in low level bits (think the difference between the hex color #ff6600 used in the HN title bar... if you changed it to #ff6601 one day, you would not be able to visually perceive that the color changed, yet you've now 'hidden' a 1 bit in your image)

NOW back to this... in the late 90's and early 2000's the steganography thing was HUGE. As in, tons of research and home-grown tools were developed during this time. "Outguess" was one of those tools, and it looks like the one referenced from the Twitter screenshot.

Remember, at its most basic level, steganography is nothing more than 'flipping' the least order bits of 'something' - whether it's color indices in a GIF file, or in this case, a JPEG file. There's no "marker" that says HEY, STEGANOGRAPHY HERE. After all, that would defeat the purpose, no?

Therefore, this is PERFECT fodder for conspiracy theorists to hook in ignorant (not using in a derogatory fashion, just folks who don't know) laypersons into thinking there is something "hidden" by waving their hands with jargon and pseudoscience. Try it for yourself- run 'outguess' in extraction mode against ANY jpeg file and you'll get random data back. Voila! Hidden messages everywhere! Better yet ENCRYPTED HIDDEN MESSAGES! OH NOES!

Now this is not all to say that steganography has never been used for high level statecraft. Read all about FBI Operation Ghost Stories - https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/operation-ghost-stories-ins....

TL;DR: a team of undeclared Russian spies (so-called 'illegals') lived inside the US for years, sending data back to Moscow. One of the ways they communicated with the "Center" was through - you guessed it - steganography. You can read all about how it worked in the criminal complaint here: https://vault.fbi.gov/ghost-stories-russian-foreign-intellig... - start at page 143.