An NSA Whiz Designs 4 Fonts to Foil Google's All

An NSA Whiz Designs 4 Fonts to Foil Google's All

ZXX, a typeface by designer Sang Mun, includes 4 different font styles designed to thwart optical character recognition. Image: Sang Mun

And while its main function today might be to raise awareness, it's not entirely hard to see a future where a typeface like this might actually prove useful. Image: Sang Mun

In the digital world, we now know, there's basically nowhere to hide. Encryption is flawed-even Tor is vulnerable-and the tech companies we rely on every day are more than happy to gift wrap our personal data for the feds. But computers don't just know how to snoop on packets and pixels. Optical character recognition, the same stuff that Google uses to scan the world's books, can turn real, physical documents into more grist for the data mill with astonishing accuracy. Sang Mun, a designer who has previously worked with the NSA during his time in the Korean military, came up with a clever way to fight back: He made a typeface that's unparsable to computers, but legible to human eyes.

'Google inspired me the most in developing a defiant typeface.'

ZXX, as the typeface is called, comes in four flavors, each exploiting a different weakness in existing OCR tech. The "Camo" style obscures letterforms with camofalgue-style blobs. "Noise" splatters them with digital graffiti. "X'ed" just lays a big, crisp X over each letter, and "False" adorns each letter with another tiny, secondary letters. With each-or better yet, a mix of them all-Mun shows how it's still possible to print a message that can't be snooped on by some camera peeking over a shoulder.

It took Mun a year to research and create the typeface, which he released last year as a free download. The name ZXX comes from a system the Library of Congress uses to denote a book's written language. ZXX means "No linguistic content; Not applicable."

The project is more of a provocation than a true security measure. "Sometimes these ideas about privacy can feel large and abstract to average person," Mun says. "I thought that addressing these issues through the design of a typeface-a building block of language and communication-would bring home the conversation to the average person." But if you let your mind visit some not-so-distant future where cameras are ubiquitous and ordinary life is mediated through sophisticated wearable devices, you can see how we could end up needing tools like this one.

"Google definitely inspired me the most in developing a defiant typeface," Mun says. "Hearing about Google Glass-a 24/7 ubiquitous panopticon-the Google Goggles app and its new image search engine, and Google's rigorous process of scanning every existing book ... All these software algorithms are programmed to extract every bit of information out of every kind of input."

When you think about that sort of future, locating those vanishingly small edge cases where human ingenuity can foil machine intelligence becomes increasingly important. "Our digitalized life is really short," Mun says, "This means laws and legislations need to be reformed accordingly. I think that's what many of us are asking for ... to transparently rebuild this from the ground up." And in case we can't quite change course and avoid an even more invasive security state, don't worry: Mun's hard at work on ZXX version 2.0.

news by September 25, 2013 at 10:05PM