Comment by jacquesm
8 years ago
If you are in the business of dealing with such information then yes, printer dots should be on your radar. I know about them, so the Intercept should definitely know about them and many things besides that I probably do not know.
The intercept could have handled this better by describing the article and maybe a citation or two, to pass the originals back in some form to the government is about as stupid as it gets.
If anything this article shows how easy it is to play 33 bits if you have help from the subject or some outsider that is just doing their job in a ham fisted way.
Fair enough. Maybe their experience with already outted leakers like Snowden, where publishing the full docs in original form was common practice, and they never fully developed a security system for handling printed documents. They are no doubt probably better experts at crypto than most of the bigger and older news orgs, I know they have some quality infosec guys, but they were ill-prepared for a traditional style leak.