I think it is deliberately written to be a little too absurd to be plausible.

In real life, if you are accused of hiding information in a well known text, you could just show that your version of the text exactly matches the original, and so there is no scope for hiding information.

Instead, the protagonist, with his lawyer's encouragement, study secondary texts on the interpretation of the text and work with the FBI to help them understand a poem someone else wrote?

It is very Kafkaesque, but also plainly obvious that it is fiction (I also started reading it with the expectation of a true story rather than fiction).

There are at least two ways of hiding information here: how much of the text to send in one go, and the time the text is sent. You could vary both to signal information about something, even though the text doesn't lead directly to any message.

A green flare is shot into the air at 11pm. Or, two green flares are shot. That's a pre-agreed signal that something did happen, something will happen or something should happen.

A paragraph is sent on August 2nd. Or, two paragraphs ...

Yes but that's a very limited amount of information, maybe only a few bits. Seems like a pretty inefficient way of hiding such a small message.

If you send between 1 and 4 paragraphs from one of four different works, a day, it doesn't take that long to send the 2048 bytes necessary to create a public key, or the 512 necessary to give the hash of one.

You're supposed to go in with the expectation of a true story, and part of the commentary of this piece is exactly where you become certain that it's fiction.

What tipped it off for me, was his "transformation" at the end. Until that point though, I assumed it was a true story.

And that scares the shit out of me.

"I will not acknowledge, however, that my actions were illegal." - See more at: http://warscapes.com/literature/cryptogams-nsa#sthash.9XxIjY... copyright anyone?

Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but..

> In real life, if you are accused of hiding information in a well known text, you could just show that your version of the text exactly matches the original, and so there is no scope for hiding information.

Except a pre-agreed set of excerpts in a particular order forms a codebook, and the order in which they are delivered easily becomes a code. The code's symbols need not just be excepts, but some combobulation involving the position of the excerpt in the source text, length of quotation, etc. etc

Picking a random book from Project Gutenberg, War and Peace has almost 12,000 paragraphs going by the HTML version. That's enough to encode one and a half words from any of the 235k entries in OS X /usr/share/dict words with just 2 quoted paragraphs

He's joking. From the front page of warscapes.com: "What does the NSA make of James Joyce? The author finds out the hard way in his imagined brush with US intelligence over the PRISM data-mining program..."