The NSA did not need these dots to track Reality Winner. Even a ordinarily secured corporate environment will record an audit log of anything written to outputs, on the service side (so the print server will effectively print a second copy to disk with all information about who printed it, mail server will record all outgoing messages even if deleted from user’s Sent folder, etc).
Yup, the FBI arrest affidavit didn't mention the dots. There could have been some parallel construction to avoid testifying about secret printer dots in court, but on the face of it it appears that the government found out who it was in more conventional ways:
>The U.S. Government Agency conducted an internal audit to determine who
accessed the intelligence reporting since its publication. The U.S. Government Agency
determined that six individuals printed this reporting. WINNER was one of these six individuals.
A further audit of the six individuals' desk computers revealed that WINNER had e-mail contact
with the News Outlet. The audit did not reveal that any of the other individuals had e-mail
contact with the News Outlet.
>On June 3, 2017, your affiant spoke to WINNER at her home in Augusta, Georgia.
During that conversation, WINNER admitted intentionally identifying and printing the classified
intelligence reporting at issue [...] WINNER further admitted removing the classified
intelligence reporting from her office space, retaining it, and mailing it [...]
WINNER further acknowledged that she was aware of the contents of the intelligence reporting
and that she knew the contents of the reporting could be used to the injury of the United States
and to the advantage of a foreign nation.
Their way sounds much easier than using dots on a page to try to trace it back to a specific printer... especially because they already knew it came out of the NSA... the question was which person who had access to the doc and a printer in the org did it.
I'm aware of that.
I'm not saying it's not known by the public; I'm saying it's not officially acknowledged by the US government as being part of their own mass-spying programs.
In other words, it's still officially a government secret, even though everyone knows about it.
Prosecuting someone for a crime based on yellow-dot evidence could force the government to testify under oath about the yellow dots and what they mean... which could force them to answer some uncomfortable questions about how the dots got there... maybe officially admit ownership of the program... and I imagine that could open a whole legal can of worms they'd rather avoid.
The dots were used afterwards to see what happened to the document. By showing that the document she had printed was given to the press, they are able to take her in. Otherwise if multiple people had printed the same document in the past several weeks, you need to investigate each of them.
There’s no indication that happened either. The court docs say an investigator went to her house and questioned her, and she admitted to printing the doc and sending it to the press. That’s how 99% of police work is done in the real world.
Of course, but the NSA doesn’t need Microdots to track their own leaks even if the suspect doesn’t confess. They need Microdots to track YOUR printing which is why it is an affront to privacy.
At somewhere like NSA the print server can introduce small variations into the printing like margins and whitespace that can be used to make each print unique.
The Intercept knows all of this, which is why I suspect that for whatever reasons they had, they intentionally threw her to the wolves. The Intercept is not run by dummies.
