A timely reminder that 9/11 hijackers communicated in the clear. Examples: “The semester begins in three more weeks. We've obtained 19 confirmations for studie

A timely reminder that 9/11 hijackers communicated in the clear. Examples: “The semester begins in three more weeks. We've obtained 19 confirmations for studies in the faculty of law, the faculty of urban planning, the faculty of fine arts and the faculty of engineering.” — Mohamed Atta “Two sticks, a dash and a cake with a stick down. What is it?”[2] — Mohamed Atta “The first semester commences in three weeks. Two high schools and two universities. ... This summer will surely be hot ...19 certificates for private education and four exams. Regards to the professor. Goodbye.”[2] — Abu Abdul Rahman Even in China with extreme surveillance and censorship in place, Chinese people have been quite creative in their ways of circumventing censorship. An example approach is cutting and pasting official political videos together in a way that changes their meaning ever so slightly. Automatic censorship algorithms are fooled, and human analysis and censorship are necessary and very expensive to carry out. Other examples are playing with the sounds of words, or using memes or rapidly-changing euphemisms.[3] It's too difficult to automatically censor stuff where people have taken a normal word such as "chair" and send each other images of chairs as a sign of protest. An image of a chair and a birthday cake with a number of candles could indicate a date of protest. Or a chair in a picture with a number of ducks in the background, or a number of chairs stacked on top of each other. And if censors start blocking all chairs, everyone just shifts to buses, or pieces of paper, or bananas, or whatever. [1] https://community.apan.org/cfs-file/__key/docpreview-s/00-00-08-13-49/2003_2D00_03_2D00_01-Al-Qaeda-and-the-Internet-_2D00_-The-Danger-of-Cyberplanning-_2800_Thomas_2900_.pdf https://community.apan.org/cfs-file/__key/docpreview-s/00-00... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/business/technology/on-the-open-internet-a-web-of-dark-alleys.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/business/technology/on-th... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_COVID-19_protests_in_China#Censorship_and_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_COVID-19_protests_in_Chin...