The First Of The NSA Leakers Has Been Arrested

Her name is Reality Leigh Winner. I wonder if Winner is an anglicanized version of the Germanic ‘Weiner’. They could be related.

Image from here

The Daily Caller reports she is a Bernie Sanders supporter who was ‘Resisting Trump’. That article and others show that she also likes to take ‘Selfies’ and post them. Another article in the Daily Caller notes that she hated being white:“NSA Leaker: ‘Being White Is Terrorism’”

Interestingly, Errata Security explains just how she was discovered.

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 see, she thought she was smart. Rather than emailing the documents from government computers, where she knew there would be a trail, she printed them on a government printer and sent them out via US Mail. She didn’t know that there is a code on all printed materials that identifies the printer that was used. She knows now – and so do we.