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Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

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Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#41
post #21

Reminds me of the strategy of map companies, that planted tiny errors or fictional streets in their maps, so that they can identify other map companies, that copied their work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

The following is only tangentially related, but somewhat interesting. For most of its history the USSR systematically distorted publicly available maps of the country, misplacing or omitting streets and geographical features etc. This was done as a security measure, while accurate maps were classified. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-... In contrast, the classified maps were remarkably det…

China has a lot of mapmaking and GPS technology restrictions, present day, for supposedly the same reasons.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#42
post #4

Clever but easy to work around now that everyone knows the trick.

"... everyone knows the trick"...

Everyone who read the tweet or commented here at this current point in time.

Not sure most people who might be future leakers of classified stuff and targetted by this trick will be aware of it.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#43
Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk (from a few years ago) had a fun similar story. Someone inside Tesla wrote a letter, I believe complaining about product defects, which was printed by a media outlet. Figuring that the leaker printed the letter at Tesla offices (i.e. likely didn't have a printer at home), Musk re-typed the letter in Word, found out exactly how many kilobytes a Word file with that exact text would be, then searched the printer logs for who printed a file with precisely that many KBs recently. Doing this, he found the leaker. (It's been a few years since I read the book so a couple of the details may be off, but that was the gist of the story)

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#44
post #33
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Margaret Thatcher did this in the 80’s to help identify who was leaking cabinet documents to the press. I recall a story about Jobs tracking down leakers in his own executive suite by telling each of them a slightly different things in private. Not sure if it worked, but it can be a very effective deterrent.

> Margaret Thatcher did this in the 80’s to help identify who was leaking cabinet documents to the press. Surely the extra whitespace would disappear in the DTP systems used by the press?

They could use typos in different words, though, right?

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#45
post #8

Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior attract toxic employees? I guess that seems to be the case, if you read about Uber under Kalanick, or employees crying in bathrooms at Amazon. Before that tweet the thread is talking about an email Musk sent: > Scoop: Elon Musk just sent an email to all staff outlining "Twitter 2.0", writing it will"need to be extremely hardcore". Long hours, high intensi…

Identifying leaks is toxic? Overuse of the word is probably diluting its meaning.

Leaking documents is indicative of a a toxic environment where the trust has broken down in all directions.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#46
post #33
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Margaret Thatcher did this in the 80’s to help identify who was leaking cabinet documents to the press. I recall a story about Jobs tracking down leakers in his own executive suite by telling each of them a slightly different things in private. Not sure if it worked, but it can be a very effective deterrent.

> Margaret Thatcher did this in the 80’s to help identify who was leaking cabinet documents to the press. Surely the extra whitespace would disappear in the DTP systems used by the press?

Not if the papers printed photos of the docs.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#47
post #8

Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior attract toxic employees? I guess that seems to be the case, if you read about Uber under Kalanick, or employees crying in bathrooms at Amazon. Before that tweet the thread is talking about an email Musk sent: > Scoop: Elon Musk just sent an email to all staff outlining "Twitter 2.0", writing it will"need to be extremely hardcore". Long hours, high intensi…

Do you know what it's like in military organizations around the world and in history? Most men don't have a problem with authoritarian hierarchies as long as the hierarchy is justified in their view. Tech people are extremely coddled and clueless about how the rest of the world works and the moral intuitions of normal people. "The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither…

[deleted]

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just a thesaurus (which is already a technique in use).

As long as the leaker doesn't copy-paste the original and start replacing words. They'll have to clean up all the hidden chars and spaces too, then pull out the thesaurus as a last step.

I bet that a couple of passes through random different languages on Google Translate would keep the text comprehensible but be sufficiently nondeterministic to accomplish this in just a few clicks.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#49

I was thinking about this recently, couldn't you alter one word in message to create two copies, and then basically perform binary search until you find the person?

Tom Clancy in the book "Patriot games" (1987), p86 at https://archive.org/details/patriotgamesclan00clan/page/86/m... :

> ... first draft of the report, I came up with an idea to make each one unique."

> "They've been doing that for years," Holmes noted. "All one must do is misplace a comma here and there. Easiest thing in the world. If the newspeople are foolish enough to print a photograph of the document, we can identify the leak."

> "Yes, sir, and the reporters who publish the leaks know that, too. They've learned not to show photographs of the documents they get from their sources, haven't they?" Ryan answered. "What I came up with was a new twist on that. Agents and Agencies has four sections. Each section has a summary paragraph. Each of those is written in a fairly dramatic fashion."

> "Yes, I noticed that," Charleston said. "Didn't read like a CIA document at all. More like one of ours. We use people to write our reports, you see, not computers. Do go on."

> "Each summary paragraph has six different versions, and the mixture of those paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of the paper. There are over a thousand possible permutations, but only ninety-six numbered copies of the actual document. The reason the summary paragraphs are so -- well, lurid, I guess -- is to entice a reporter to quote them verbatim in the public media. If he quotes something from two or three of those paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who leaked it. They've got an even more refined version of the trap working now. You can do it by computer. You use a thesaurus program to shuffle through synonyms, and you can make every copy of the document totally unique."

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#50
post #25

Also worth noting that this did not work out, because their general counsel accidentally replied all to the email, giving everyone in the company a safe copy to leak.

Good way to cover your ass if the general counsel is the one doing the leaks...
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