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On 5 June 2017, a federal contractor named Reality Winner was charged with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet. That material — National Security Agency documents describing the extent and nature of Russian hacking into the United States' 2016 presidential election — was published by The Intercept about an hour before Winner was arrested. Later reporting revealed that visually imperceptible yellow dots added to the document when it was printed may have provided investigators with all the information they needed to locate the person responsible for its leaking: the date and time it was printed, and the serial number of the exact printer on which it was printed. A widely-shared post on a blog called Errata Security demonstrated this process using the actual file published by The Intercept: Speaking about the version of this technology employed by his company, senior Xerox research fellow Peter Crean told PC World in 2004 that the dots are nearly impossible to see under normal light without magnification, but can be seen under blue LED light or through modifications on a computer: While much of the information around federal use of printer tracking dots remains undisclosed, we know that the concept has its origins in preventing the creation of counterfeit currency with laser printers. We also know that at least some printer companies have worked alongside the governments of multiple nations to install software and hardware to defeat these efforts since the 1980s, as discussed in a 2008 article in USA Today: A 2004 statement released by the The Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, a working group of 27 central banks and note printing authorities, announced for the first time the creation of a collaborative agreement with private software and hardware makers to prevent counterfeit currency production, indicating that participation in the program was voluntary: This disclosure created controversy, especially in social libertarian circles, over fears that this secret information violated an individual's right to privacy. In response to some of these fears, Secret Service agent and director of the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group Lorelei Pagano assuaged doubts by saying: That may or may not have been true in 2004 when the existence of these coded printer dots was publicly announced, but it was definitely not completely true in 2008 when USA Today printed the assertion. That's because in October 2005, Internet civil rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation cracked the tracking dot code employed by Xerox, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Epson and Brother (among others). EFF actually created a open source program that anyone can use to break the code, which is described in basic terms here: EFF's investigations have revealed an extensive list of printers that produce the same hidden coded metadata. Based on documents they have received through Freedom of Information Act requests, EFF believes that it is possible that all lasers have this, or similar, technology: The fear, as articulated by EFF researcher Seth Schoen in a 2008 interview, was that this technology has the potential to be used against political figures, whistleblowers, and people doing nothing illegal whatsoever. There's nothing about this technology that limits its application to counterfeit investigations, he told USA Today at that time. Those fears may have been realized in the arrest of Reality Winner. While the official story provided by the Department of Justice makes no mention of tracking dots, that account does state that the conclusion was based on figuring out when and where the leaked file was printed. Errata Security noted in their blog post that all of the information they needed to make that conclusion was contained in those barely perceptible yellow dots: In response to the news of Winner's arrest, The Intercept stated: In a 6 June 2017 statement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation acknowledged the possibility that Winner’s arrest could have stemmed from printer dots, but also stated that definitive proof that they were used in this case has not been made public:
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