Comment by nyczomg

The KGB caught some Soviet dissidents the same way. They had a (mandatory) register of the unique imprint pattern of every mechanical typewriter.

- "Nightmare for the KGB: The Advent of Photocopy Machines"

- "In the early 1960s the Soviet ruling elite—in this case, the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, responsible for ideology and counter-subversion, and the Agitprop Department, the party’s main watchdog over “ideological” matters —imposed special procedures for introducing newly invented photocopying machines. The procedures were designed to prevent the use of photocopying machines for producing copies of materials viewed as undesirable by the authorities."

- "Decades earlier, a similar approach was used for typewriters. Proprietors of offices and stores had to provide local KGB branches with sheets of paper showing examples of the font of every typewriter they had. These sheets enabled the KGB, using technical procedures, to determine the origin of any typed text."

- "In one case that occurred at my present place of employment—the Institute of World Economy and International Relations—the KGB traced an “illegal” social-democratic-oriented journal advocating “socialism with a human face” to a typewriter belonging to the secretary of the Institute’s director. Only a few dozen copies of the journal had been produced, but this proved to be enough to put five or six young people in jail for a year. The Institute’s director fired his secretary, who had permitted her son-in- law to use her typewriter to produce the illegal copies."

- "The only typewriter I knew of that could not be traced by the KGB was one I had in my home. It had been presented as a gift to my father, Soviet statesman Anastas Mikoyan, when he made an official trip to East Germany and visited a factory there that produced typewriters."

https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Eroding-the-Soviet-... ("Eroding the Soviet “Culture of Secrecy”, Sergo A. Mikoyan (2001))

Ideally she would be pardoned but only if she agrees to go by Leigh so we can stop pretending it's normal for someone to be named "Reality Winner".