A well-placed flyer can reach the eyes of thousands of people per day, regardless of which social media platform they use, if any.
If you make a flyer for an event, share the file online and encourage others to print them out too.
Before sharing, remove the metadata with Scrambled Exif on Android or Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit on Linux. Sending a copy to a friend? Send it over Signal.
The EFF has stated that basically every color printer does this now, so much so that they stopped updating the list of the ones that do. You need to be aware of it.
Every printer is capable of this stenography, and every printer does so at the behest of the US and other governments. This has been happening since at LEAST 2004.
Again, not all printers print in color.
Black and white printers employ stenography too.
https://openreview.net/pdf?id=F-IFNTqwEv
Stop being so confidently incorrect for fucks sake.
Black and white printers employ stenography via dithering the image.
So unless you’re using some ancient dot matrix printer via an old LPT port, chances are anything you print can be traced back to you.
I’m saying this for your SAFETY you luddite. I have a past in the security industry and you wouldn’t believe the things that they can use to identify you.
I get it, ignorance is bliss and all, but I’m trying to educate you. Activism is going to be a little uncomfortable.
The article you linked to does not say that all, or even any, grayscale printers automatically insert any kind of steganography into their output. Nor could I find anything like a reliable source claiming that they do. It’s been known for a very long time that the kind of technique they were proposing as a possibility could be done, but there seems to be no evidence that what you’re claiming is actually happening.
There’s no need to shout at people and call them names (incidentally, how does being insufficiently skeptical of digital printers make someone a “luddite”?) for having a somewhat higher level of risk tolerance than you. The risk you’re describing may or may not actually even exist. If it exists, it may or may not apply to them. How old is their printer? Did they buy it new from the manufacturer, with cash from their small town electronics shop, or used at a garage sale from someone who never knew their name? Even if the printer is somehow traceable to them, the technique you’re worried about is apparently not public knowledge, so would law enforcement be willing to expose it publicly in court to prosecute you over a flyer for your local mutual aid project, or whatever people have in mind to print a flyer for? Would they even bother with forensic analysis and significant investigative footwork on some random flyer they found posted around town (as opposed to large-scale counterfeiting or copying of classified documents, which are apparently the only cases this technology is known to have been used in)? Would it be reliable with documents that have been taped over and exposed to the elements, as flyers often are? Other methods of publicizing things are also susceptible to other types of forensic analysis and surveillance. Are those risks necessarily lower? How do you know?
Many people with professional backgrounds like yours overestimate the risk from highly sophisticated but rarely used law enforcement techniques while overlooking much less exotic ones that are actually bigger risks to most ordinary people. Activism, if it’s genuinely subversive, is usually more than a little uncomfortable and inherently involves risks, which are never 100% avoidable. Insisting on absolutely airtight “opsec” for everything one does that the government might find objectionable is paralysing to the point that it can amount to “obeying in advance” and arguably increases risk for everyone by reducing the pool of dissidents the state needs to contend with and creating a pervasive atmosphere of silent obedience. People should be aware of what plausible risks they face, but ultimately have to make their own decisions about what level of risks they’re comfortable with. You don’t need to get angry and personally attack people for not overstating them.
Crazy and concerning. Thanks for sharing.
Do you know if plotters have anything like this, or would I be safe using mine?
It’d be quicker and probably easier to 3d print a set of custom stamps, and use that.
Alternatively, a stencil and spray paint will never leave you with these problems. You’ll just have to severely limit the size of your “flier”. That, and being careful about how you buy your spray paint.
Yeah, but I’ve got a plotter and not a 3D printer lol
You could still use your plotter to make a stencil. Get a sheet of cardboard/plastic/thin wood, have it plot your design, and then manually cut out the lettering/symbols/etc.
Been planning to do basically that with mine for a while now.
I’ve made stencils before, but I was wanting a decent pasteup option too, just because they’re faster to put up and less sus than spray paint. Maybe leave a tiled flier design to run overnight and then cut it apart or something.