Slashdot Mirror
How a Few Yellow Dots Burned the Intercept's NSA Leaker (arstechnica.com)
On Monday, news outlet The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. The documents revealed that a Russian intelligence operation sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials days before the election, which ran through a hack of a U.S. voting software supplier. Hours later, the Department of Justice charged 25-year-old government contractor Reality Leigh Winner with sharing top secret material with the media. The DoJ said it Winner had "printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information" before mailing the materials. But how could the DoJ know that it was Winner who had printed the documents, or that the documents were printed at all? ArsTechnica explains: [...] The Intercept team inadvertently exposed its source because the copy showed fold marks that indicated it had been printed -- and it included encoded watermarking that revealed exactly when it had been printed and on what printer. The watermarks in the scanned document The Intercept published yesterday -- were from a Xerox Docucolor printer. Many printers use this or similar schemes, printing faint yellow dots in a grid pattern on printed documents as a form of steganography, encoding metadata about the document into its hard-copy output. Researchers working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation have reverse-engineered the grid pattern employed by this class of printer; using the tool, Ars (and others, including security researcher Robert Graham) determined that the document passed to The Intercept was printed on May 9, 2017 at 6:20am from a printer with the serial number 535218 or 29535218. Further reading: How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner.
While not everybody knows about the yellow dots, almost everybody involved with infosec does. How can The Intercept can be trusted to hold or publish any leakers' information securely?
Was this one reporter who screwed up? Didn't he have a second person reviewing his work? Isn't there a team of people at The Intercept who discuss whistleblowing publications? Isn't anybody on such a team aware of digital privacy issues?
This will be a huge loss if The Intercept becomes useless as it was basically founded to handle stories like this. But given that, how could the outcome have been so bad in this case?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
While interesting, and certainly providing confirmation, this wasn't the primary mechanism that was used to track her down according to the affidaivat. Before even IDing a specific printer, they simply looked for someone that had printed it out, period.
Internal auditing showed that only six employees had printed out the item in question. A search of the six computers showed that she had emailed The Intercept from her work computer (and that no one else had). Coded metadata just backs it up, but it's dumber than that.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Or ask The Bruce: https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
She should have kept it. Remember, everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Leigh...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Sadly, she is being charged under the Espionage Act. There is no defense, no mitigating circumstances, and she will spend many long years in prison as an example. Even if you disagree with her actions , this sounds inappropriate. Like the Soviet Union or China.
As a non-native English speaker, I ask: is this an actual, socially acceptable name in English-speaking countries?
Unlike, say, French, American English does not have a ruling body. It's whatever the speakers of it chose to say.
That includes names. You can call your child or yourself anything you chose - as long as you do not do so to defraud.
(My wife's career was blighted by an abusive father - a professor - who solicited name suggestions from his students. Though she is native born and a native speaker of American English, she missed out on a lot of job interviews because HR droids thought, from the name he hung on her, that she was a new immigrant who would have communication problems.)
If you go through a legal name change you may run into issues with not being able to switch your name to something that amounts to a title of nobility (due to article 1 section 9 paragraph 8: No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: ..."). Immigration had a history of misapplying that to strip things like "von" from immigrants' names as they filled out their paperwork.
As for "socially acceptable", that depends on the prejudices of the particular social subgroups in question. Regardless of what they might think of neologisms labeling a person, any name from any established cultural group anywhere in the world is necessarily acceptable.
If Frank Zappa can name his son "Dweezil" and his daughter "Moon Unit", it's easy to see that anything goes. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> and picked a more socially acceptable name
Her birth name is Sara, not "Reality". She chose to be Reality Winner instead of the normal name her parents had chosen.
Nothing, the President of the United States has the authority to declassify anything at any time.