Moreover, Tom can pull blocks out of one message and insert them into another, and the resulting message will decrypt into readable plaintext if he sends them to Bob or Alice. After a while, Tom will be able to tell a lot about encrypted messages just by looking at which ciphertext blocks appear in them. If Tom realizes that he's looking at encrypted news reports, he can even look for patterns in the ciphertext and see if they match patterns of character blocks in the plaintext news reports. If Bob regularly takes Voice of America news reports and encrypts them, Tom can look for repeated blocks of ciphertext and infer that they talk about the same subject. Peeping Tom, who works for the secret police, monitors their encrypted e-mail. For example, imagine that Bob and Alice are dissidents under an oppressive regime, and they use encryption to exchange uncensored news reports and have e-mail discussions that quote large portions of those reports.
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