Steganography is the art and science of hidden writing. While an encryption program such as our companion JavaScrypt page protects your message from being read by those not in possession of the key, sometimes you wish to obscure the very fact you're sending an encrypted message at all. An encoded message just screams you're using encryption, which may attract unwanted attention to your activities even if snoopers cannot read the text of your messages. Steganography attempts to conceal the presence of an encrypted message; over history a wide variety of techniques have been used: secret compartments in objects, invisible ink, microdots, grilles used to hide letters of a message among innocent text, and, in the digital age, embedding messages as imperceptible noise in images and audio files.
This page implements a very rudimentary form of steganography; an encrypted message is converted to what, at first glance, looks like English text. It is, in fact, English text, but complete nonsense, consisting of words chosen from a dictionary of 65536 (216) words, each encoding two bytes of the message in the position of the word in the dictionary. Punctuation and paragraph breaks are sprinkled through the text to make it look (marginally) more plausible. Let's be frank: anybody who gives this text more than a cursory glance is going to immediately twig to the fact that something very odd is going on here (unless, perhaps, you give it a suitably postmodern title and cast it as a paper published in Social Text). To make things less obvious, you may wish to embed the text generated by this page into a long document, having beforehand established a convention with your correspondent to permit them to locate it.
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