Greetings From the Invisible Borderlands

BY MADELEINE MORLEY

Could antiquated spy techniques be the securest form of communication in the age of digital surveillance?

Ovid’s advice to young women in first century Rome who were watched closely by their parents: “A letter too is safe and escapes the eye, when written in new milk / Touch it with coal-dust, and you will read.” The classical poet recommends hiding these love notes between the sole of your foot and the heel of your shoe.

After the Pearl Harbor attack during WWII, U.S. intelligence formed a counter-steganography censorship organization dedicated to destroying suspicious material. Suspect items banned or destroyed when in the hands of the postal service included: crossword puzzles, chess games, student grades, stamps with numbers on them, and children’s handscrawled Christmas lists. The numbers might designate a key in an “nth letter code.”

“Authority cannot control what they cannot see,” writes Wu in her publication The Tactics and Poetics of Invisibility: A toolkit of analogue steganography, due to be published in 2018. In it, she details recipes and methodologies for circumventing digital surveillance, dreaming up ways to combine disregarded antiquated techniques with digital platforms to form useful, intuitive hybrids. After spending time presenting at CryptoParty gatherings in Rotterdam in 2015—a community event that teaches the basics of internet privacy to anyone interested—Wu is all too aware of how encryption software asks too much of people with average computer skills, which is why she’s turned to analog and digital mixes.

Her text, written just as much for the graphic designer as the everyperson, follows in the footsteps of centuries of manuals, dictionaries, and cookbooks recounting homespun recipes for secret communication that anyone could follow. Wu herself cites the 1558 guide Natural Magick by Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta as an important resource. The book includes useful chapters such as “How you may write in an egg,” and recipes so that “letters may appear upon crystal by strewing on of fine dust.” There are also grisly steps informing one how to “shut up letters in living creatures.”

“A lot of people visiting Beijing notice that high-street clothing is riddled with English text, often in bold Helvetica or Arial reminiscent of a brand like Supreme,” says Wu. With this in mind, she designed her fashionable patches and ribbons. Underneath English translations of Zhen essay titles, she included a QR code that would take the interested party to the entire Chinese version of the text—uploaded to a private, European server developed by her former professor at the Willem de Kooning Academy to bypass Chinese censors. Other Helvetica tees camouflage the English text when worn out in the city, and Wu explains that the QR code is also ubiquitous in China, unlike in the West. “Homeless people don’t write on signs, but instead hold up QR codes so that you can pay straight into their bank accounts,” she explains. According to Wu, the QR code “has become a ‘habitualized’ mode of information access, and as a result its pervasive visual presence inadvertently provides an inconspicuous cover.”

Wu tells me one last story from during her time in China, explaining how a queer, feminist arts collective called Q-Space wanted to run a lesbian sex–position live-drawing event, but no gallery would host the exhibition out of fear of the censors. “I came up with a solution,” she says. “Artists would use invisible ink to create the images, and then we’d give all the gallery-goers the key to viewing them. The drawings wouldn’t even need to stay in the gallery that way: We could hang them everywhere, even on the streets.” With her covert hacks, Wu’s not invested in communicating to everyone, just to the few who cannot speak freely. It’s visual communication for the underdog.