🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct6.211135.2563@unislc.uucp> erc@unislc.uucp (Ed Carp) writes:

   Ross Anderson (rja14@cl.cam.ac.uk) wrote:

   : I believe I did mention in my original posting that the spooks did this 
   : during the war. If they saw a telegram saying `father is deceased' they'd 
   : change it to `father is dead'; if they got lucky, a dumb spy would query, 
   : `is father dead or deceased?' (This is all in Kahn's book.)

   Ton Clancy wrote about this in one of his books.  The CIA used it
   to discover who had leaked what to the press by generating slightly
   different memos and distributing them.  Each memo was slightly
   different, and no two were alike.  They were written in such a way
   that they all said the same, yet a quote taken from one would
   immediately identify which copy was leaked.

the british government has taken to doing essentially this.  different
cabinet members are given copies of documents with different spacing
patterns.  if they leak a xerox to the press, then it is very clear
whose copy it is.

the countermeasure is to scan and reprint anything you want to leak.