Ch 32: Psychotic Ramblings

~
(David

The indexed words from the Protestation, using the 11, 7, 4, 2 fallback rule, produce the letters which, out of paranoia, I resolve only in my mind. It’s a painstaking process because it’s so hard for my brain to just remember things right now.

I go through it in chunks that I can remember.

228: practice = C

118: accordance = A

321: firmly = M

186: rectitude = U

276: baptized = E

93: whole = L

“Camuel”.

315: of = F

82: contemplation = I

131: preserving = V

22: begotten = E

“Five”. The word “five”. Got it, I can remember that.

204: indecent = N

68: modifications = O

163: demons = O

98: contained = N

382: myself = E

“No One”.

367: holy = Y

83: contrivance = E

295: universal = S

“Yes”.

“Camuel Five No One Yes.” I’m obviously doing it right. This looks useful. But what do I do with it?

I look back through the words of the Protestation and it dawns on me that this “fallback rule” for choosing letters allowed JFoxe to arbitrarily pick from a number of possible words, sometimes many, sometimes few, depending on the letter, that could work to give him the letters he needed.

This adds an arbitrary human-choosing element to the cipher, in contrast to an algorithmic choosing mechanism. This human arbitrariness could give security algos a bit of trouble, if they were even looking. But with steganography, there first has to be suspicion that there is a secret message in the covertext.

Looking back at my research reveals that in 1624 “Gustavus Selenus”, whose real name was Augustus II (1579-1666), Duke of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Germany, wrote a book called Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae Libri IX, sometimes translated as The Cryptomenytics and Cryptography of Gustavus Selenus in Nine Books.

It’s considered one of the most important Renaissance cryptography texts and is frequently cited in cryptographic history research.

Selenus explained Trithemius’s Steganographia Book I “spirits”, clearly showing them to be steganography ciphers and explaining exactly how they work. It’s difficult reading. Selenus wrote in the elite, erudite style of his time—but with an extra abstruse, obfuscatory syntax that makes his explanations difficult to parse. He demystified Trithemius’s writing, yet did so in a prose style that itself functioned, I believe, as a kind of cryptographic barrier.

Funny— explaining something to help simplify it, yet doing so in turgid, cryptic language. Reminds me of some of the more pompous memos I’ve read from Harrington.

Selenus explained, among other things, that the pattern of a given Steganographia cipher can be expanded through a number of iterations or “Classes” of the cipher, each with slightly increased complexity and resistance to detection. Selenus explained that the fifth “Class” of Camuel is like this:

00000.00000., etc. repeating

where “0” = ignore word and “.” = meaningful word.

Simply pick out every 6th word and take the first letter.

It seems clear enough to me that these words, “CAMUEL FIVE NO ONE YES”, refer to this fifth Class of Camuel.

Five words are to be ignored (skipped, “no”) and then one word will be meaningful (“yes”), and the recipient takes the first letter of the meaningful word.

I can see how using this pattern would make it easy to create a covertext that doesn’t look unusual. One could even take any kind of innocuous text and go throuhg it making the minimal changes necessary to ensure that every 6th word starts with the desired letter.

I’m very hopeful this is how JFoxe did it. He may have chosen to make his covertext look “innocuous” by making it look totally crazy, with the interdimensional reptilians and flat earth and whatnot.

JFoxe has provided no further elaboration on the Camuel pattern. Can it really be this simple?

I’m hoping that all I have to do next is apply this fifth class of Camuel against JFoxe’s manifesto.

I look again at the first section of the manifesto. I haven’t looked at the opening paragraph since the day I found it on the forum. It starts out somewhat normal, but quickly veers off into pure insanity:

“This is a work of truth, not fiction. It will tell of things that have clearly been proven by reputable news reporting and sources. The “official news” versions of every one of these stories yelled “conspiracy theory”. But years later, “theories” reveal themselves to be “facts” and even the most skeptical are forced to admit it. Ideas that they said were impossible or ridiculous are routinely revealed as the truest facts of all. Naturally they always make fun of those who dare to find out the truth and to publish actual facts. For they are without truth; to them, truth is heresy. Please, reader, research these facts and find out for yourself. Especially Reptilians and the underground Antarctica UFO revelations. After being abducted by Reptilians, I receive psychic messages every single night. The messages are from Martian guerrilla fighters who tried to overthrow the forces that destroyed their planet one billion years ago. We must never let the Reptilians….”

The manifesto goes on and on like this before getting into the first “Conspiracy Fact”, about the Big Data Breach “False Flag Attack.”

Only in my mind, for fear of detection, I begin applying the Camuel cipher to the text from the beginning: 00000.00000. Take the first letter of each meaningful word.