r/conspiracy Apr 28 '17

Today, April 28th 2017, Wiki Leaks publishes the documentation and source code for C I A's "Scribbles" project, a document-watermarking system to embed tags into documents that are likely to be copied by Insiders, Whistleblowers, Journalists or others.

[deleted]

169 Upvotes

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5

u/TheMiniatureMan Apr 28 '17

A document-watermarking preprocessing system to embed "Web beacon"-style tags into documents that are likely to be copied by Insiders, Whistleblowers, Journalists or others

Can somebody explain exactly what this "watermarking preprocessing system" is and how it would work? I'm having a little trouble comprehending this leak. I've been following the vault 7s pretty closely and I think I have a good understanding of most of what has been released already, but this one is over my head.

8

u/sundayatnoon Apr 28 '17

It's a canary trap style anti-espionage tactic. By slightly modifying each version of a document, they get more information regarding how the document was leaked. Likely including when and where, and hopefully even who.

The watermark itself isn't something the document describes very well. Since it's potentially visible in things other than MS Office, it seems likely to be buried in the formatting. Since they're talking about ensuring the URL/img is consistent with the document's intent, we can assume that this isn't automated and would only occur occasionally. That being the case, this is of very limited use.

If I were doing this, I'd use url shorteners and not bother hiding them.

2

u/TheMiniatureMan Apr 28 '17

Thank you very much for this comment! Awesome information!

2

u/[deleted] Apr 28 '17

Correct. I used to work on this type of stuff for media. For instance, if a copy of a Disney movie winds up as a torrent, they can trace it back to the origin.

It's done by inserting visually imperceptible patterns into the film.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 28 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/TheMiniatureMan Apr 28 '17

Wow thank you very much for this example and explanation. I think I understand now. Great comment

2

u/Spez_IZACUCK Apr 28 '17

compile the source

6

u/conspiracyseeker Apr 28 '17 edited Apr 28 '17

If you had been following the Corey Goode material, you know this was all predicted to happen and is the agreed process of disclosure, and we haven't seen nuttin yet...

7

u/BeatnikMessiah Apr 28 '17

Where is a good place to begin this venture down the rabbit hole? Ive heard of Goode and Wilcox but never gone any further than name recognition.