Albury is not the first source to have been burned by poor journalistic practices and source protection methods at The Intercept. Just nine months ago, Reality Leigh Winner, a now 26-year-old federal contractor, was arrested for allegedly leaking a classified NSA document to The Intercept
that was related to an investigation of an alleged Russian military
intelligence hacking operation targeting the U.S. Ever since her initial
arrest, Winner has been held in pre-trial detention and has been denied bail. She faces up to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act and her trial is set to begin in October of this year.
While The Intercept
has long maintained that it was unaware that Winner was the source of
the document, FBI documents have shown that negligence helped lead
federal investigators straight to Winner.The Intercept’s
scanned images of the intelligence report that Winner leaked contained
tracking dots – a type of watermark – that, according to Rob Graham of
the Errata Security blog, showed
“exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed.” These
dots make it easy to identify a printer’s serial number as well as the
date and time a document was printed. As Graham noted, “Because the NSA
logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up
precisely who printed the document.”
In addition, and perhaps most concerning of all, the FBI warrant
also notes that the reporter in question – who is unnamed in the
document – contacted a government contractor with whom he had a prior
relationship and revealed where the documents had been postmarked from –
Winner’s home of Augusta, Georgia – along with Winner’s work location.
He also sent unedited images of the documents that contained the
tracking dot security markings that allowed the document to be traced to
Winner.
-- Whitney Webb, "Bad Track Record Gets Worse as New Whistleblower Outed by The Intercept" (MINT PRESS NEWS).