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> Sentences subtly reordered, slight differences in word voice or spelling. Though that makes collaboration more difficult. I think that would make collaborati

> Sentences subtly reordered, slight differences in word voice or spelling. Though that makes collaboration more difficult. I think that would make collaboration impossible. If that were standard practice collaboration would eventually uncover that was occurring, and a leaker would compensate. IMHO that technique is only valid when the recipients can be assumed to not be in contact, or as an unusual thing to identify a leaker when one is already suspected.

scarmig 5y ago
> If that were standard practice collaboration would eventually uncover that was occurring, and a leaker would compensate. I don't think that's really the issue. Let's suppose you have 64 employees with access to a doc. You can uniquely identify them with 6 bits in the doc. A doc of a couple pages would be more than enough to put in those bits, and many more. Even if you had two collaborators who shared docs for a word for word diff, they'd still miss half the identifying bits, which reduces the potential culprit pool to 8, and that's assuming zero redundancy. The issue I imagine is more usability. Someone identifies one of those bits as content that should be changed: what happens when they suggest the edit?
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Even if you had two collaborators who shared docs for a word for word diff, they'd still miss half the identifying bits, which reduces the potential culprit pool to 8, and that's assuming zero redundancy. That's not really what I'm talking about. It seems like you're focusing on identifying all the exact bits that are being used to identify someone, but that's not important. What is important is the recipients figuring out that someone is monkeying with the documents in a systematic way to trace them. Once a leaker knows that, instead of leaking the exact document for publication, they'd either leak reworded summary of key points themselves, or require the journalist to only publish something similar.

scarmig 5y ago

> If that were standard practice collaboration would eventually uncover that was occurring, and a leaker would compensate. I don't think that's really the issue. Let's suppose you have 64 employees with access to a doc. You can uniquely identify them with 6 bits in the doc. A doc of a couple pages would be more than enough to put in those bits, and many more. Even if you had two collaborators who shared docs for a word for word diff, they'd still miss half the identifying bits, which reduces the potential culprit pool to 8, and that's assuming zero redundancy. The issue I imagine is more usability. Someone identifies one of those bits as content that should be changed: what happens when they suggest the edit?

tablespoon 5y ago
> Even if you had two collaborators who shared docs for a word for word diff, they'd still miss half the identifying bits, which reduces the potential culprit pool to 8, and that's assuming zero redundancy. That's not really what I'm talking about. It seems like you're focusing on identifying all the exact bits that are being used to identify someone, but that's not important. What is important is the recipients figuring out that someone is monkeying with the documents in a systematic way to trace them. Once a leaker knows that, instead of leaking the exact document for publication, they'd either leak reworded summary of key points themselves, or require the journalist to only publish something similar.