Obfuscation

• 1. Introduction

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  Obfuscation is the craft of making a message hard to understand, and one of its starkest examples opens with a line about school. "The semester begins in three more weeks." Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 attacks, sent those words to his fellow conspirators before the attacks took place. Read plainly, it sounds like a note between students. Yet every part of it was meant to say something else to the people who knew how to listen. That raises a handful of questions. Where does the word come from, and who uses the fog on purpose? Why do doctors stand accused of it? And why is the most famous warning against it so confusing to read?

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• 2. Darkening the Message

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  The word comes from the Latin obfuscatio, built on the verb obfuscāre, which means to darken. Rarer English cousins include beclouding and abstrusity. The idea is to hide the intended meaning of a message behind language that is confusing or ambiguous. Three tools do most of the work. Circumlocution means talking around a subject instead of naming it. Jargon is the technical language of a profession. Argot is the private speech of an ingroup, and it carries little meaning for outsiders. Intent usually comes attached to the word, but the fog can also be an accident. In expository writing, accidental obfuscation tends to gather in rough drafts, at the start of composition. Critical thinking and editorial revision, by the writer or by an editor, are what burn it away. Critics of one profession say it has made the second tool, jargon, into a habit.

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• 3. The Doctor's Shorthand

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  Michael Crichton, the American author and physician, once described medical writing as a "highly skilled, calculated attempt to confuse the reader". His complaint echoes a wider charge that doctors use jargon to keep unpleasant facts from patients. The psychologist B. F. Skinner offered a sharper reading of medical notation. He called it a form of multiple audience control. A single note reaches two readers at once. The pharmacist understands every word. The patient, who might object to some of what the note says, cannot follow it. In this view the vocabulary is a quiet filter that decides who gets the full message. Teachers have a very different way of fighting unclear prose, and it comes as a joke.

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• 4. Eschew Obfuscation

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  "Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation" is a line English teachers and professors like to deliver when they lecture on good writing. Taken literally, it asks writers to avoid being unclear and to support being clear. The humor lies in the vocabulary. Listeners who do not know the uncommon words are left confused by a sentence that preaches clarity. That makes it ironic, and more precisely a heterological phrase, one that fails to fit what it describes. Teachers call this kind of self-defeating advice a fumblerule. The phrase was in print at least as early as 1959, when a NASA document used it as a section heading. An older relative appears in Mark Twain's essay Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. His rule fourteen of good writing is "eschew surplusage". Not all fog is a classroom joke, though, and some of it is meant to hide a message from the wrong listeners.

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• 5. Talking Around

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  Atta's message did not stop at the semester. It reported 19 confirmations for studies in four faculties: law, urban planning, fine arts and engineering. Investigators believe each phrase is a code word. The semester is thought to stand for the planned attacks, and the 19 confirmations for the hijackers. The faculty of law is believed to mean the United States Capitol, and urban planning the World Trade Center. Fine arts is read as the White House, and engineering as the Pentagon. This method is sometimes called talking around. It gives a measure of secure communication with no technology at all, and it is a form of security through obscurity. The illegal drug trade leans on the same trick to hide trafficking. A common spoken example is "420", a code word for cannabis, which remains illegal in most places despite some prominent decriminalization. The Drug Enforcement Administration reported in July 2018 that traffickers used 353 different code words for cannabis. Spoken code needs no computer, but the same instinct for hiding meaning now lives inside software.

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• 6. Fog in the Machine

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  Anti-cheat tools and malware share an unlikely habit, which is code that is deliberately hard to read. Software obfuscation is the process of making a program difficult to understand while leaving its behaviour unchanged. Programmers often do it to protect intellectual property and to block reverse engineering. A DRM scheme shows the hardest version of the problem. The user's own machine holds the secrets, and the user may be the adversary. White-box cryptography uses obfuscation to keep cryptographic keys from being extracted when the adversary controls the device. The word turns up a third time in network security. There it describes methods that disguise an attack payload so that network protection systems cannot inspect it properly. Fiction has put obfuscation to work as well, in a barnyard and in a British sitcom.

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• 7. Villains of Doublespeak

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  In the British sitcom Yes Minister, the character Sir Humphrey Appleby often speaks in obfuscation, and the effect is comic. His aim is to confuse Jim Hacker and stop him from taking charge. In Animal Farm the stakes are darker. The pigs Squealer and Napoleon use doublespeak to muddle the other animals. Their purpose is to prevent any uprising, so the fog serves as a tool of control rather than a source of laughs. Jim Hacker's wish to take charge is exactly what Sir Humphrey's talk is built to head off.

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