TheIntercept Compromises Courageous Leaker Reality Winner

[grarpamp]

http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reality-winner.html
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/

Monday, June 05, 2017

How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner

Today, The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an
NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor
named "Reality Winner" was published, showing how they tracked her
down because she had printed out the documents and sent them to The
Intercept. The document posted by the Intercept isn't the original PDF
file, but a PDF containing the pictures of the printed version that
was then later scanned in.

The problem is that most new printers print nearly invisibly yellow
dots that track down exactly when and where documents, any document,
is printed. Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it
can use this to match up precisely who printed the document.

In this post, I show how.

You can download the document from the original article here. You can
then open it in a PDF viewer, such as the normal "Preview" app on
macOS. Zoom into some whitespace on the document, and take a
screenshot of this. On macOS, hit [Command-Shift-3] to take a
screenshot of a window. There are yellow dots in this
image...............