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This has been a generally known technique for identifying leaks for at least three decades (and certainly much longer---Tom Clancy described it in a novel in 19
by ajarmst 9y ago
This has been a generally known technique for identifying leaks for at least three decades (and certainly much longer---Tom Clancy described it in a novel in 1987). The use of non-printing characters is an obvious extension of the idea. Any journalist who has published copy/pasted material from a confidential source since then is provably incompetent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
- ajarmst 9y agoIn case it wasn't obvious, that was at least partly aimed at The Intercept: http://heavy.com/news/2017/06/the-intercept-reality-winner-statement-nsa-leaker/ http://heavy.com/news/2017/06/the-intercept-reality-winner-s...
- jandrese 9y agoThe danger with using non-printable characters is that they may not survive a document conversion. If someone faxes and then OCRs the document your watermark is lost. Someone copies and pastes your document into a dumb text editor with an ASCII font and suddenly your characters show up as very obvious garbage, etc...