EDIT: of course I would misspell 'tech literate'... I hope that isn't keeping anyone from this because It's serious and I am hoping the right person (people in this field?) can tell us whether it is a possible lead or its nothing.
STEGANOGRAPHY: the practice of concealing messages or information within other non-secret text or data.
The technology exists today to hide secret messages, audio files and even other images within a single large image file.
The secret images or other information is embedded and cannot be extracted without the right software tools and understanding.
I am not well versed on these things but I have inside information that confirms this is possible and products exist which do this. I am concerned about saying too much and being identified, but I will try to contribute to the discussion. I am hoping to find some people who understand the technology and the possible encryption/software/ math involved better than I do.
What made me think of this tech being applied here is there are lots of images and other files in Podesta emails and other places that people have dug up, that are strange or unexplained. (mr potato head for example, or random innocent images attached to suspicious emails that they seem unrelated to) In some cases the files are unusually large. Here is an archived discussion from 8ch about some audio and image files that are suspicious and unexplained (https://archive.is/VxQvD)) a poster mentions that one of the images is too large to upload, which made me think this type of concealment could be at work.
Can anyone with a better understanding weigh in? If there are questions I will respond if I can but again I am not an expert, only a concerned observer with some information about this technology and these steganography tools.
Can someone try applying this to all of these suspicious images?
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ejd4500 ago
If you send me a list of wikileaks email links with files, I have some tools that I can use which attempt to locate stuff hidden in images.
But, if they put it there, they most likely encrypted it as well which is a dead-end. I checked a few images and never found anything - not even anything encrypted (doesn't me it's not there at all) but happy to check anything 'suspicious' you find.
salinaslayer ago
I remember when the discussion was still on 4chan and swiss anon found extra data in the "it doesn't get any better than this" email attachment, he managed to identify file names inside and we never heard from him again.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/10037
Meanwhile we've heard all sorts of theories that Wikileaks may have been compromised and even a later report that some of the emails on the website were altered.
So I suggest if you're going to look into that, so far the only tangible source of evidence to stand beyond plausible deniability in all of this investigation, that you look for the Podesta torrents and source your files from there instead of the website, analyze those instead.
ejd4500 ago
Good point. I might actually do that. Thanks.
StopThePizza ago
ejd what tools are you using? for reference and to see if those I'm familiar with are different
If there is something I can do to help please do lmk here or PM me