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> (This dynamic isn’t limited to political reporting. In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published a story called “The Big Hack” that was vigorously denied by

> (This dynamic isn’t limited to political reporting. In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published a story called “The Big Hack” that was vigorously denied by Apple and Amazon. Based on these denials, certain tech bloggers became convinced that the story was false. The fact that neither Apple nor Amazon sued Bloomberg for defamation—despite being extremely rich, finicky, and litigious—made nary a dent.) That's an interesting point! > But Politico has a strong incentive to protect their source. By making their own scan from a paper original, they wouldn’t open themselves up to the disclosures of confidential information that have tripped up others. (That said, printed documents are not necessarily free of metadata, as Reality Winner found out the hard way.) If you color-scan a printed document at low-enough resolution, will it corrupt the color-printer dot patterns or are they resilient to that? > I conclude it must be someone who only had access to a stapled, printed copy of the draft opinion. (If the person had access to the underlying digital file, they wouldn’t have printed & stapled it just to unstaple it.) IMHO, the author is reading too much into that and many other things. The impression I get is he already has a favored suspect (who is obvious though he doesn't name her), and his whole analysis is looking to find a path to finger that person. It's totally plausible to me that a moderately savvy leaker with a digital file would leak a printed copy to protect themselves from metadata, and that Politico just used lesser equipment that the author assumes they would have. Quick and dirty is more often the rule than careful and perfect. Even the meaning of the staple may be very unclear: at work I print everything stapled, because I set it as a default in my print settings. If for some reason I realize I don't want it, it's actually easier for me to remove it than to go back to my desk to print another copy after changing the setting and go back to the printer.

er4hn 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code The visibility section of the wiki link suggests that they may be resilient. They are printed using a low visibility color (light shade of yellow) which can be made visible via post processing. While they do note using a high resolution scanner, I suspect that could be made less important by building redundancy into the MIC, a la how QR codes can function well despite having portions be damaged or missing.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  I wonder if anyone has looked at the leak for a MIC/yellow dots. It contains a color channel (see highlighting) so it is plausible it could, even if re-scanned.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    I quickly isolated the blue channel of the document and ramped up the saturation (which should emphasize yellows), but I can't find any obvious dots (even at 10x zoom). AFAIK it's not the only method in use though, just the most well known.
  - nullc 5y ago
    I checked it and failed to find any. Though if it was scanned from a color print its very likely that they were there in the paper version-- they just may not have survived scanning.
zerocrates 5y ago
I was thinking along those Reality Winner lines that if I were an organization today getting a leaked document like this, what I would do would be to print it and then scan it grayscale and post that. Thereby being sure to avoid issues of embedded metadata and probably making it at least harder to read things like sneaky printer codes. Not that I'd really expect the Supreme Court to use something like that, but just as a general principle. Obviously this wouldn't be foolproof (something as simple as having a subtly different version of that office routing "stamp" on page 1 for different recipients would suffice to narrow things down a lot) but good practice anyway. Other than it being color, that's what I would have assumed was done here, except the staple holes and relatively decent image quality do seem to argue against it.
- scarmig 5y ago
  I've always thought that the best approach would be to embed some kind of steganographic identifier in the rendered text. Small variations in the spacing or even kerning. The simplest way to get around that would be to retype the whole document, which is a bunch of friction. But to counter that, more invasively, the texts different people would get could be different themselves. Sentences subtly reordered, slight differences in word choice or spelling. Though that makes collaboration more difficult. Less technical savvy but resourced organizations wouldn't face difficulty using those approaches. It could just be a bit that an IT admin toggles on the GSuite or MS Office admin panel.
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    You could use OCR, and reproduce it as all ASCII. Apparently EVE Online guilds would start to put minor variations in the text of memos, or even alter critical information (like changing timing of convoys or attacks by a few minutes) to weasel out informants.
    - jdougan 5y ago
      My facvorite was when the forum background image had the logged-in user encoded into it
Manuel_D 5y ago
> The fact that neither Apple nor Amazon sued Bloomberg for defamation—despite being extremely rich, finicky, and litigious—made nary a dent For private individuals, the thresholds for defamation lower. But for public officials, and corporations defamation is nearly impossible to prove. It's not enough to prove that the statements made were false, it's also necessary to prove that they were made with malicious intent. Unless there's some bombshell piece of evidence, like journalists actively conspiring to tear down a target, the journalists can just say "well, we were just writing a piece interesting for our readers." The 9-0 supreme court case that set this precedence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan
- Hizonner 5y ago
  Not to mention that suing over something like that would just have called attention to it. There's no universe in which Apple or Amazon would actually benefit from filing that kind of lawsuit even if they won it. And there are relatively few universes in which whoever was making the decision would be dumb enough to think they'd benefit.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Only reason for them to fill such suit is if they were malicious and wanted the other party to waste time, money and resources... Not exactly something that is good corporate leadership. Or even good for their shareholders.
- vel0city 5y ago
  > were made with malicious intent That's not what "actual malice" means. Actual malice means: > with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not So its not just that they wanted to harm the person, but that they took reckless disregard to whether it was true or not. Essentially, writing something without even doing a bit of fact finding to try and support it would be considered "actual malice". You don't need to prove the defendant wanted to harm the person being libeled, just that they didn't care whether or not what they were saying was true or not.
scythe 5y ago
>If you color-scan a printed document at low-enough resolution, will it corrupt the color-printer dot patterns or are they resilient to that? I think that if you used Fourier analysis, you could identify the frequency generally associated with the dot size, and delete the signal in that band. This can also be used to achieve excellent reduction of the Moiré effect: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/moire-no-more-688319 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/moire-n... https://ijournals.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/5.3106-Khanjan.compressed.pdf https://ijournals.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/5.3106-Khanj... This has the advantage of also not reducing the image quality as badly as when you try to blur the patterns away spatially.
pvg 5y ago
That's an interesting point! It's not really, it's a misunderstanding of both the US defamation legal landscape and the typical behaviour of large corporations in such circumstances. A news org getting a story wrong is not defamation and statistically nobody sues over stuff like that because it's nigh-impossible to win.
- ghaff 5y ago
  And whether or not we ever know the truth, such as it is, it's pretty clear to me that the companies involved sincerely believe their positions at an executive level and that BBW editors really believe their position for whatever reason. The whole thing is very strange.
- autoexec 5y ago
  > A news org getting a story wrong is not defamation Exactly, and neither is a journalist outright lying as long as it's not harming someone's reputation. I have no idea why the author says: "I trust the journalists, because there are still serious legal consequences for news organizations that publish falsehoods" There are zero legal consequences for news organizations who knowingly lie and mislead as long as they do it with a little bit of care.
MrMetlHed 5y ago
I imagine the Supreme Court is an environment where everyone prints everything. Everyone is in their 50s (some in their 70s) and they probably print and annotate everything manually. I imagine there are copies of everything floating around and picking one up and making another copy wouldn't be all that difficult. I also wouldn't assume Politico has full staff in office yet, and it wouldn't surprise me if they made a scan-of-a-handed-off-copy on a personal device to get to their web staff. It's pretty brave of them putting it online as a scan still, I think I'd have retyped or taken closer care to crop out the edges and all that just in case (source: Am journalist.) But maybe they handed it to someone in digital forensics and ensured any sort of microdots were stripped out. I worry about words being switched on a per-copy basis as a trap (Tom Clancy used it as a plot device ages ago and it stuck with me,) so maybe they knew it was a copy that floated around and couldn't be traced, or they're not as paranoid as me.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>I worry about words being switched on a per-copy basis as a trap So you support leaking Supreme Court draft opinions and prefer leakers not be caught? You realize the consequences of legitimizing this for the rule of law, right? If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bigfudge 5y ago
    This is already a much bigger problem than this leak. Selective enforcement of drug laws is rife in the us. Are you also concerned about that?
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      A leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion is an extraordinary breach of judicial confidentiality protocols and severely damages the integrity of the highest court. Are you saying that the rule of law is already so degraded in other areas that further degrading it with this kind of action is of no consequence and therefore if it happens to advance what you consider to be a good policy then we should welcome it?
fluidcruft 5y ago
> If you color-scan a printed document at low-enough resolution, will it corrupt the color-printer dot patterns or are they resilient to that? It should be completely trivial to destroy any markings in the PDF. Black and white text in particular once scanned can just be thresholded and passed through filters. Heck it seems like a trivial application of deep learning to obfuscate text. For example, it would be interesting to train a transformer to learn degradation from multiple print/scan cycles using the same source using different printers and scanners so that it learns how to fake all sorts of imprecision.

er4hn 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code The visibility section of the wiki link suggests that they may be resilient. They are printed using a low visibility color (light shade of yellow) which can be made visible via post processing. While they do note using a high resolution scanner, I suspect that could be made less important by building redundancy into the MIC, a la how QR codes can function well despite having portions be damaged or missing.

Someone1234 5y ago
I wonder if anyone has looked at the leak for a MIC/yellow dots. It contains a color channel (see highlighting) so it is plausible it could, even if re-scanned.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  I quickly isolated the blue channel of the document and ramped up the saturation (which should emphasize yellows), but I can't find any obvious dots (even at 10x zoom). AFAIK it's not the only method in use though, just the most well known.
- nullc 5y ago
  I checked it and failed to find any. Though if it was scanned from a color print its very likely that they were there in the paper version-- they just may not have survived scanning.

zerocrates 5y ago

I was thinking along those Reality Winner lines that if I were an organization today getting a leaked document like this, what I would do would be to print it and then scan it grayscale and post that. Thereby being sure to avoid issues of embedded metadata and probably making it at least harder to read things like sneaky printer codes. Not that I'd really expect the Supreme Court to use something like that, but just as a general principle. Obviously this wouldn't be foolproof (something as simple as having a subtly different version of that office routing "stamp" on page 1 for different recipients would suffice to narrow things down a lot) but good practice anyway. Other than it being color, that's what I would have assumed was done here, except the staple holes and relatively decent image quality do seem to argue against it.

scarmig 5y ago
I've always thought that the best approach would be to embed some kind of steganographic identifier in the rendered text. Small variations in the spacing or even kerning. The simplest way to get around that would be to retype the whole document, which is a bunch of friction. But to counter that, more invasively, the texts different people would get could be different themselves. Sentences subtly reordered, slight differences in word choice or spelling. Though that makes collaboration more difficult. Less technical savvy but resourced organizations wouldn't face difficulty using those approaches. It could just be a bit that an IT admin toggles on the GSuite or MS Office admin panel.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  You could use OCR, and reproduce it as all ASCII. Apparently EVE Online guilds would start to put minor variations in the text of memos, or even alter critical information (like changing timing of convoys or attacks by a few minutes) to weasel out informants.
  - jdougan 5y ago
    My facvorite was when the forum background image had the logged-in user encoded into it

Manuel_D 5y ago

> The fact that neither Apple nor Amazon sued Bloomberg for defamation—despite being extremely rich, finicky, and litigious—made nary a dent For private individuals, the thresholds for defamation lower. But for public officials, and corporations defamation is nearly impossible to prove. It's not enough to prove that the statements made were false, it's also necessary to prove that they were made with malicious intent. Unless there's some bombshell piece of evidence, like journalists actively conspiring to tear down a target, the journalists can just say "well, we were just writing a piece interesting for our readers." The 9-0 supreme court case that set this precedence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan

Hizonner 5y ago
Not to mention that suing over something like that would just have called attention to it. There's no universe in which Apple or Amazon would actually benefit from filing that kind of lawsuit even if they won it. And there are relatively few universes in which whoever was making the decision would be dumb enough to think they'd benefit.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Only reason for them to fill such suit is if they were malicious and wanted the other party to waste time, money and resources... Not exactly something that is good corporate leadership. Or even good for their shareholders.
vel0city 5y ago
> were made with malicious intent That's not what "actual malice" means. Actual malice means: > with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not So its not just that they wanted to harm the person, but that they took reckless disregard to whether it was true or not. Essentially, writing something without even doing a bit of fact finding to try and support it would be considered "actual malice". You don't need to prove the defendant wanted to harm the person being libeled, just that they didn't care whether or not what they were saying was true or not.

scythe 5y ago

>If you color-scan a printed document at low-enough resolution, will it corrupt the color-printer dot patterns or are they resilient to that? I think that if you used Fourier analysis, you could identify the frequency generally associated with the dot size, and delete the signal in that band. This can also be used to achieve excellent reduction of the Moiré effect: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/moire-no-more-688319 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/moire-n... https://ijournals.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/5.3106-Khanjan.compressed.pdf https://ijournals.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/5.3106-Khanj... This has the advantage of also not reducing the image quality as badly as when you try to blur the patterns away spatially.

pvg 5y ago

That's an interesting point! It's not really, it's a misunderstanding of both the US defamation legal landscape and the typical behaviour of large corporations in such circumstances. A news org getting a story wrong is not defamation and statistically nobody sues over stuff like that because it's nigh-impossible to win.

ghaff 5y ago
And whether or not we ever know the truth, such as it is, it's pretty clear to me that the companies involved sincerely believe their positions at an executive level and that BBW editors really believe their position for whatever reason. The whole thing is very strange.
autoexec 5y ago
> A news org getting a story wrong is not defamation Exactly, and neither is a journalist outright lying as long as it's not harming someone's reputation. I have no idea why the author says: "I trust the journalists, because there are still serious legal consequences for news organizations that publish falsehoods" There are zero legal consequences for news organizations who knowingly lie and mislead as long as they do it with a little bit of care.

MrMetlHed 5y ago

I imagine the Supreme Court is an environment where everyone prints everything. Everyone is in their 50s (some in their 70s) and they probably print and annotate everything manually. I imagine there are copies of everything floating around and picking one up and making another copy wouldn't be all that difficult. I also wouldn't assume Politico has full staff in office yet, and it wouldn't surprise me if they made a scan-of-a-handed-off-copy on a personal device to get to their web staff. It's pretty brave of them putting it online as a scan still, I think I'd have retyped or taken closer care to crop out the edges and all that just in case (source: Am journalist.) But maybe they handed it to someone in digital forensics and ensured any sort of microdots were stripped out. I worry about words being switched on a per-copy basis as a trap (Tom Clancy used it as a plot device ages ago and it stuck with me,) so maybe they knew it was a copy that floated around and couldn't be traced, or they're not as paranoid as me.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>I worry about words being switched on a per-copy basis as a trap So you support leaking Supreme Court draft opinions and prefer leakers not be caught? You realize the consequences of legitimizing this for the rule of law, right? If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bigfudge 5y ago
  This is already a much bigger problem than this leak. Selective enforcement of drug laws is rife in the us. Are you also concerned about that?
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    A leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion is an extraordinary breach of judicial confidentiality protocols and severely damages the integrity of the highest court. Are you saying that the rule of law is already so degraded in other areas that further degrading it with this kind of action is of no consequence and therefore if it happens to advance what you consider to be a good policy then we should welcome it?

fluidcruft 5y ago

> If you color-scan a printed document at low-enough resolution, will it corrupt the color-printer dot patterns or are they resilient to that? It should be completely trivial to destroy any markings in the PDF. Black and white text in particular once scanned can just be thresholded and passed through filters. Heck it seems like a trivial application of deep learning to obfuscate text. For example, it would be interesting to train a transformer to learn degradation from multiple print/scan cycles using the same source using different printers and scanners so that it learns how to fake all sorts of imprecision.

> (This dynamic isn’t limited to polit­ical reporting. In 2018, Bloomberg Busi­ness­week published a story called “The Big Hack” that was vigor­ously denied by

> (This dynamic isn’t limited to polit­ical reporting. In 2018, Bloomberg Busi­ness­week published a story called “The Big Hack” that was vigor­ously denied by

> (This dynamic isn’t limited to political reporting. In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published a story called “The Big Hack” that was vigorously denied by

> (This dynamic isn’t limited to political reporting. In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published a story called “The Big Hack” that was vigorously denied by