Protecting Whistleblowers Requires Technical Knowledge/Skills
From the EFF, which no longer protects journalists and bloggers: (prostitutes are more important)
18 hours ago a company published this common old knowledge that very sadly and alarmingly/worryingly the mainstream media - i.e. something we assume is meant to inform, not to enrage - never talks about (one must rely on privacy-conscious NGOs and geeks' media):
Most users assume that if they print a document offline it is untraceable.This is actually false for almost all modern laser printers.
They include a feature called Machine Identification Code or MIC. The printer synthesizes a pattern of tiny yellow dots onto every single page. They are less than a millimeter wide and invisible to the naked eye, but if you put them under blue light or magnification you can see the grid.
This dot matrix encodes the exact Serial Number of your printer and the Date and Time the document was printed.
It was originally designed to track counterfeit currency but it is now standard on commercial printers.
Even if you use a VPN such as PureVPN to download a leaked document anonymously, the moment you print it you are stamping it with your hardware ID. To be truly anonymous you need a black and white only printer or a dot matrix printer which do not use this technology.
The media does not avoid the topic due to D-notices (or equivalents) but due to complicity and it doesn't take a genius to see who owns this media. Those people aim to crush investigative journalism. We wrote about it yesterday [1, 2].
The above observation (about printers) was covered here several times many years ago. It has since then become "old news" and almost no Web site talks about it anymore (not because the issue went away or was somehow resolved). Myself, as editor of Techrights, explained this to the highest judge for Media in the UK High Court 2.5 months ago (typists made a transcript of the whole thing; we'll probably release that in a few years, it is unclassified).
She said she found that interesting. See, even the highest media judges aren't aware of how to protect sources in this digital age. █