Thursday, April 08, 2004

Read my lips...

Remember back when the POW blinked out the word TORTURE in Morse code? Then there's the story of the lanterns in the window of the Old North Church - "one if by land, or two if by sea". Baseball coaches are always sending signals in plain sight. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book in which a "Lord Haw-Haw"-like propaganda character for the Third Reich was actually a double agent, and he conveyed intelligence to the Allies in the way he paused, coughed or otherwise articulated. There's an entire field called steganography in which information is hidden in other information.

It is for that reason analysts pore over every al-Qaeda video or message in hope of catching disguised instructions. Yet some would-be sophisticates seem not to grasp the import of the new initiative against pornography by the Bush administration. We know how Atta and his gang of mass murderers used to hang out with strippers, and some strippers are porn stars - how diabolically clever it would be to send messages via porn!

Those moans sound inarticulate to you? Ha! Strategic use of words like "baby", "ooh", "yes!", "more!" and others could in fact convey encoded information. Count the number of partners, what they do, positions, how many strokes, objects used, number of piercings or tattoos - all could convey messages.

And watch your P's and Q's - authorities like the late Sam Kinison have told us that the secret of success with certain practices is to "lick the alphabet". Do I have to spell it out for you?

So don't be so quick to dismiss the porn investigation. Who knows what the investigators will come across?

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