Forwarded from BlackBox (Security) Archiv
Tracing Paper
Color printers mark printouts with barely visible codes that are used to track down currency counterfeiters, as well as everyone else.
In 2017, when a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower wanted to extract classified government documents from her work computer, she sought refuge in the printed page. Maybe she thought physical paper would be safer from digital surveillance than an email. So she printed the documents at her office and then mailed them to The Intercept, which broke the news with the headline, “Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election” on June 5th, 2017 at 3:44 p.m. eastern time. A few hours later, the US Department of Justice officially announced their arrest of Reality Winner, a former US Air Force officer and NSA contractor.
What happened? The Intercept contacted the NSA on May 30th asking them to verify the documents. But by sending the scanned images that included each page’s wrinkles and folds, as opposed to retyping the information, the journalists shared more than they intended to: they sent the NSA the pale yellow tracking dots that are embedded in every piece of paper that is printed by a color laser printer. The dots form rectangular grids of rows and columns, with each dot’s position corresponding to the value of a date, time, or printer model.
Together, the rows and columns constitute a machine-readable bitmap known as a machine identification code (MIC). MIC grids repeat across the page so that even if only a shred of a page is recovered, the MIC on that shred can still be decoded and traced. While neither the Justice Department’s nor the FBI’s statements about Winner’s arrest mentioned MICs, security experts strongly suggested that they played a role in helping the agencies identify her and, at the very least, corroborated other evidence linking Winner to the leak.
https://logicmag.io/security/tracing-paper/
#tracing #paper #printers #digital #surveillance
📡 @nogoolag @blackbox_archiv
Color printers mark printouts with barely visible codes that are used to track down currency counterfeiters, as well as everyone else.
In 2017, when a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower wanted to extract classified government documents from her work computer, she sought refuge in the printed page. Maybe she thought physical paper would be safer from digital surveillance than an email. So she printed the documents at her office and then mailed them to The Intercept, which broke the news with the headline, “Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election” on June 5th, 2017 at 3:44 p.m. eastern time. A few hours later, the US Department of Justice officially announced their arrest of Reality Winner, a former US Air Force officer and NSA contractor.
What happened? The Intercept contacted the NSA on May 30th asking them to verify the documents. But by sending the scanned images that included each page’s wrinkles and folds, as opposed to retyping the information, the journalists shared more than they intended to: they sent the NSA the pale yellow tracking dots that are embedded in every piece of paper that is printed by a color laser printer. The dots form rectangular grids of rows and columns, with each dot’s position corresponding to the value of a date, time, or printer model.
Together, the rows and columns constitute a machine-readable bitmap known as a machine identification code (MIC). MIC grids repeat across the page so that even if only a shred of a page is recovered, the MIC on that shred can still be decoded and traced. While neither the Justice Department’s nor the FBI’s statements about Winner’s arrest mentioned MICs, security experts strongly suggested that they played a role in helping the agencies identify her and, at the very least, corroborated other evidence linking Winner to the leak.
https://logicmag.io/security/tracing-paper/
#tracing #paper #printers #digital #surveillance
📡 @nogoolag @blackbox_archiv
Logic(s) Magazine
Tracing Paper
A brief history of the secret plan to track every printed page.