Comment by rl3
8 years ago
>To fix this yellow-dot problem, use a black-and-white printer, black-and-white scanner, or convert to black-and-white with an image editor.
I'm not convinced that would be sufficient, especially the latter option.
Also this is the NSA. If they're smart, they have backup fingerprinting that isn't publicly known.
Yes, b/w converting is not sufficient. Once printed, the yellow dots are hard to remove.
http://imgur.com/a/kLovh
And even when you mask them out so that they are no longer visible in the "all white" (paper) background, e.g. by messing with the white/black point of the image there's still the possibility that they could be recovered with correlation methods in grey areas where they aren't visible to the naked eye or just by increasing the contrast.
Why would there be grey in a thresholded image? The entire point of the transform is that it maps everything above a certain threshold to pure white and everything else to pure black.
They didn't say "convert to greyscale".
> They didn't say "convert to greyscale".
Very good point. But even then, assume that one page of a leaked document contains a large picture with areas around the thrshold value: With the agency being able to recreate a perfect replica of the initially scanned paper version, but without yellow dots, it might be possible to extract the (very few) bits necessary to boil it down to a single printer serial number by statistical methods.
2 replies →
2bpp BMP FTW!
Use a low-quality copier at a copy shop to copy the documents. Or maybe fax them.
Or do what Greenpeace did and retype them.
I'm assuming this also. Aka watermarking?
It's trivial to inject systematic, minor changes in whitespace or fonts that create a serial number in an image based document format. Every individual obtaining a TS document could be given their own numbered copy for traceability.