Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept’s handling of the reporting, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker. In October 2020, The Intercept’s co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald wrote that Winner had sent her documents to The Intercept’s New York newsroom with no request that any specific journalist work on them. He called her exposure a “deeply embarrassing newsroom failure” resulting from “speed and recklessness” for which he was publicly blamed “despite having no role in it.” He said editor-in-chief Betsy Reed “oversaw, edited and controlled that story.” An internal review conducted by The Intercept into its handling of the document provided by Winner found that its “practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves”.
A technology that was made To Stop Criminals™ being used against a political whistleblower? Color me surprised! (thanks for sharing the link btw, didn’t know about that)
You’re very welcome. It’s good to be able to show real-world examples so people are less skeptical. A lot of people won’t read a deep technical document describing printer surveillance, but they will read a paragraph excerpt from Wikipedia.
And they will argue that whistleblowing is actually a crime, because, uhm, it’s, uhm, yeah it’s illegal! And if it’s illegal to be a good citizen, then this is totally warranted and no scandal at all, because only bad people do illegal things!
Many people are willing to sacrifice a lot of people for the tiny chance of maybe stopping a criminal once.
Actual opinion some people hold: “We need to make end-to-end encryption illegal to stop criminals”
How on earth is that meant to work? Criminals are criminals. They don’t care whether or not it’s illegal. At this point, just declare all crime illegal and call it a day. At least that won’t be a huge infringement on honest people’s privacy and security.
A recent anti-organised crime operation set up a fake end to end encrypted phones and sold them to criminals, capturing all calls, messages, and internet traffic
If they hadn’t, a real version of the same would have been supplied to criminals, since it’s easy and cheap
Interesting. I remember reading a news article before 2017 stating that printers used to do this, but the practice has since ended because someone was able to prove they were doing it in the mid-2000s. At the time, I saw some people on Reddit claiming they just switched to a new, harder to detect method, and everyone was saying they were conspiracy theorists.
On wikipedia there’s some suggestion that methods that involve intensity of toner/ink across a document could be used to uniquely identify a machine but no such methods are currently publicly known (at least as far as the Wikipedia article has been updated)
Those dots are practically invisible if you have the printed copy, they’re not going to be visible at all in a photography. Printers and their network leave a lot to logs behind, pretty sure they just check up the printed files of their network, found the document and who send the printer order and done.
So you think tracking her down with forensic methods that objectively exist is farfetched, but accessing the print logs of every printer in America to figure out which one printed the document is realistic?
Every printer in America? She wasn’t a random person accessing those documents in her local Starbucks. That was a secret document printed in a government computer.
It’s cheaper and easier to look at the print logs. Most business computer and printer solutions tie every print to a user and log at least the name of every document printed
The hidden code is for court cases where they wish to prove which machine made the print, they’re not very good for identifying which user printed something in a multi user environment
It’s how Reality Winner got real fucked.
via Wikiedpia:
A technology that was made To Stop Criminals™ being used against a political whistleblower? Color me surprised! (thanks for sharing the link btw, didn’t know about that)
I can’t, I’m out of yellow.
Just use the Fake color (because we call it Fake News nowadays instead of Yellow Journalism).
I’ll see myself out.
You’re very welcome. It’s good to be able to show real-world examples so people are less skeptical. A lot of people won’t read a deep technical document describing printer surveillance, but they will read a paragraph excerpt from Wikipedia.
And they will argue that whistleblowing is actually a crime, because, uhm, it’s, uhm, yeah it’s illegal! And if it’s illegal to be a good citizen, then this is totally warranted and no scandal at all, because only bad people do illegal things!
Many people are willing to sacrifice a lot of people for the tiny chance of maybe stopping a criminal once.
Actual opinion some people hold: “We need to make end-to-end encryption illegal to stop criminals”
How on earth is that meant to work? Criminals are criminals. They don’t care whether or not it’s illegal. At this point, just declare all crime illegal and call it a day. At least that won’t be a huge infringement on honest people’s privacy and security.
Wait. Crime is not illegal? No wonder all those criminals are doing it.
A recent anti-organised crime operation set up a fake end to end encrypted phones and sold them to criminals, capturing all calls, messages, and internet traffic
If they hadn’t, a real version of the same would have been supplied to criminals, since it’s easy and cheap
…if you meme it, they will come!
To be fair Reality Winner sent her emails to the intercept from her government account, so she was fucked anyway and it was just a matter of time
Interesting. I remember reading a news article before 2017 stating that printers used to do this, but the practice has since ended because someone was able to prove they were doing it in the mid-2000s. At the time, I saw some people on Reddit claiming they just switched to a new, harder to detect method, and everyone was saying they were conspiracy theorists.
On wikipedia there’s some suggestion that methods that involve intensity of toner/ink across a document could be used to uniquely identify a machine but no such methods are currently publicly known (at least as far as the Wikipedia article has been updated)
Digimarc
Source: I work in flexography.
Those dots are practically invisible if you have the printed copy, they’re not going to be visible at all in a photography. Printers and their network leave a lot to logs behind, pretty sure they just check up the printed files of their network, found the document and who send the printer order and done.
So you think tracking her down with forensic methods that objectively exist is farfetched, but accessing the print logs of every printer in America to figure out which one printed the document is realistic?
Every printer in America? She wasn’t a random person accessing those documents in her local Starbucks. That was a secret document printed in a government computer.
It’s cheaper and easier to look at the print logs. Most business computer and printer solutions tie every print to a user and log at least the name of every document printed
The hidden code is for court cases where they wish to prove which machine made the print, they’re not very good for identifying which user printed something in a multi user environment