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Police have been doing this since the days of typewriters. If you're a whistleblower with sensitive information, assume your printing device has a unique ident
by DevX101 4y ago
Police have been doing this since the days of typewriters. If you're a whistleblower with sensitive information, assume your printing device has a unique identifier. This is how Reality Winner was caught, when she leaked info about Russian interference in US elections.
If you're in a highly secure environment, it's even possible the content itself may be a unique identifier. I could imagine a sensitive document having grammatical alterations unique to each recipient.
Journalists should consider this before publishing unredacted copies of leaked documents.
- hutzlibu 4y ago"Police have been doing this since the days of typewriters." Well, that the typewriters and today the printers are unique, sure. But here they seem to claim(I do not speak the articles language) that they could identify the computer that send the document. Which is a very bold and new claim, I think.
- treesknees 4y agoZoom does something like this. They'll embed unique information into the meeting and meeting audio. I've also heard that the arrangement of the participants can also be a watermark but I don't have a source for that. https://theintercept.com/2021/01/18/leak-zoom-meeting/ https://theintercept.com/2021/01/18/leak-zoom-meeting/
- el-salvador 4y agoIt's a feature found on the zoom admin panel: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360021839031-Adding-audio-watermark https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360021839031-Addin...
- treesknees 4y agoYep, the article I linked includes screenshots of the Admin panel and hyperlinks to a few Zoom support pages. I wonder how well the audio fingerprint works over telephone. On one hand, it certainly won't have the same frequency range as a laptop speaker, but on the other hand so few people join by dialing in, it may end up obvious who the leaker is.