Earlier this week Salon’s new tech correspondent (and former Wired Newsperson) Farhad Manjoo wrote a great, sceptical article about the use of steganography by terrorists. One question I have about steganography is where the encoding and decoding software comes from. Are there off the shelf steganography software packages? If not, who’s writing it for al-Qaida. We find bomb making workshops, and chemical weapons workshops, and training videos, but we have yet to find al-Qaida’s IT department. Of course, the software-writing terrorists could be anywhere in the world, exchanging encrypted data (perhaps even using steganography), but it seems odd to me that we have not heard of any proprietary, terrorist-specific software installed on computers that we’ve found in the possession of terrorists.