This reflection takes its cue from the current international news, the arrest of a very famous U.S. rapper, accused of rather serious crimes (unfortunately, it also seems quite notorious among insiders).
What caught my eye instead, or rather I would say more my ear, allow me the pun, because this is what we will talk about in a moment, was the song “Fuel” by rapper Eminem (among my favourite songs there will always be Stan, Without Me and Lose Yourself).
In his latest album entitled “The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce)” released in July 2024, he included the song Fuel (here the song from the author’s official channel), which immediately rose to fame in recent days, as it talks, not too subtly, about the events related to the well-known rapper arrested, more than 2 months after the album’s release.
In particular, if on the one hand, one is struck by the use of metrics and accents, all wisely postponed towards the end of the words or anticipated in those rhetorical figures that should be defined (in Italian) as diastole and systole (with effects on the heart that could also justify their use in both fields, scientific and rhetorical), to be subservient to the rhyme, on the other hand, one witness astonished an operation of musical craftsmanship that we could define as poly-semantic chiselling, for the masterly work done in assigning further meanings to words, and in this case to entire sentences, concealing (but not too much!) further meanings beyond those immediately perceptible by reading the text.
Unlike what happens in Italian, for example, where there is a perfect correspondence between spelling and phoneme, in English it is possible to write a word in one way and read it in a completely different way than what is written. “Playing” (so to speak) on this aspect, the rapper Eminem has inserted some significant verses, making many people prick up their ears. In particular, in the following verse we read:
“I’m like a R-A-P-E-R (yeah),
Got so many S-As (S-As), S-As (huh),
Wait, he didn’t just spell the word,
‘Rapper’ and leave out a P, did he? (Yep).”
In this one verse, we find several “hidden” meanings, which I leave to the reader to unearth (for the lazy ones, here is an article from the British Daily Mirror newspaper online version). This purpose of hiding the meaning of certain words or entire sentences within other “containers” cannot help but bring to mind the use of steganography.
We have talked about it several times on our blog, especially here, and this occasion allows me to reflect on the fact that such an ancient and well-known technique, even if relatively simple and immediate in its implementation, could become difficult to interpret with current tools.
There have been many examples over time of hidden meanings within musical pieces, using different methods such as metaphors, symbolism or other more refined ones as in the case in question. It is worth remembering songs that for this reason have caused a lot of talks, rightly or wrongly, such as Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin Hotel California by the Eagles or various pieces by the Beatles and Queen, with accusations of inserting hidden messages that would reveal themselves when listening to the songs backwards (not for nothing are they songs born from the era in which vinyl was all the rage).
Since the need to communicate and convey messages is a driving mechanism that has always pushed human beings to cross the boundaries of knowledge, we will shift our attention to another use of the same technique, on a less artistic but certainly more pragmatic and functional side. As you can read in this article by Amnesty.org, to circumvent the censorship imposed by the Chinese government, some Chinese social media users (the services called Weibo and the WeChat application are explicitly mentioned) have used methods that strongly recall that of the song seen previously. In addition to having used abbreviations and acronyms to indicate names and places that would certainly have been censored, a certainly imaginative use, but very similar to the use by rappers seen a little while ago, was to write posts containing phrases like: “narrow neck bottle” which were then censored anyway because the pronunciation in Chinese recalled the name of their president, as well as posts containing the phrases “bad at learning” because the word “learning” in Chinese has the same meaning as the president’s surname.
The topic of exchanging communications, in every possible form, is so deeply felt in China that it has given rise to microblogging services, called Weibo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging) through which movements for freedom of expression and anti-censorship have found fertile ground, also giving rise to issues of new politicization of the web, as indicated in this article .
(There is a whole world on this topic of censorship and anti-censorship, to which our Alessandro Rossetti could soon dedicate a series of articles and to whom I extend my thanks for the food for thought).
As far as detection is concerned , despite the many tools to try to detect the presence of steganography inside any multimedia container, which we can find available everywhere on the net, even in the Tsurugi Linux distro (here is the list of included tools), in recent years methods that make use of the inevitable AI have stood out, but also of sophisticated techniques such as those of Large Language Model (LLM), very promising in specific cases such as this one discussed in this recent study entitled “Towards Next-Generation Steganalysis: LLMs Unleash the Power of Detecting Steganography” (available at this address).
I close this long article with one last thought. In the era of AI, automatic tools and massive analysis through Natural Language Processing (NLP), the detection of a simple yet effective method of concealing the message like the one used in the text in question, certainly created by neo-artisans of modern steganography, does not seem easy to detect, not even using the most advanced detection techniques, despite the fact that in reality the meaning is there for all to see (or rather, hear).
All this, combined with the difficulty of doing OSINT in languages other than your own, presupposes that in addition to the study of typical OSINT techniques, an in-depth knowledge of local cultures is necessarily added, which is not always easy to understand when analyzing languages (and idioms) completely different from your own.
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