Still. He’d have to have the same normal.dot, make the same space/tab choices, same fonts, etc.

And in a large company, how many ~1 page letters get printed? What are the odds that there is only a single match in the entire company?

I take this story similar to the binary coded space story: more likely to be apocryphal and promoted to deter future leakers than true stories about catching them in the past.

Could be the case that there were only a handful of things printed at the whole company in a week, considering how obsolete paper has been getting

Perhaps it wasn't an exact byte match, but close enough to only 1 print job size within a reasonable time frame.

Exactly this. If you know that its around 36kb, and had to be printed between two dates, the list narrows substantially. And more than likely, the printer queue or corporate compliance tools had additional functionality that made such a search trivial.

I have my own story about this: In the early 2010's I had a boss that loved to call us and check in every day. We were a remote team and he had anxiety that we were all larking off. I later learned his technique was to open the dropbox admin tools to see the location of someone before calling them. "So, BarelySapient, where are you working at today?", he'd ask in a jovial tone. But in reality, he was testing employee for truthfulness. Every call. He later fired one of my co-workers when they reported to be working from home, but dropbox reported them somewhere in the Florida keys....

... and here I'm just happy about German employee and EU data protection laws. This kind of abuse would be plainly illegal here and entitle the employee to significant compensation.

What part would be illegal?

Certainly possible, but also relies on the assumption that this was done on company equipment. When leaking info under a vindictive boss I would think opsec rule #1 is avoid company equipment as much as possible. Even without a printer at home, it's quite easy to send a print job to a local office or shipping store.

Data exfiltration is an extremely dangerous risk in the world of corporate espionage, especially for a company like Tesla that is trying to be first to market with something as massive as FSD.

There is no way I would send anything to an external print shop from company equipment; they are almost certainly on top of that as well.

This has gotten me genuinely curious, I wonder what the safest way to get a document like that onto your own device is. Printing it on a work printer doesn't seem ideal, but I don't really know what the best approach is. Maybe emailing it to an outside address or sharing it as a document via Dropbox or similar? Copying to physical storage? All of those seem fairly easy to monitor as well though.

If any infosec experts feel like chiming in I'd love to learn more.

Anything done on a corporate machine needs to be assumed monitored. The paranoid approach would be to fully power off the machine, take the hard drive out, then use an independent machine to mount and read the data off that. Now, if they suspect that approach, or they suspect you personally, there will likely be evidence of your hardware tampering. But it would thwart automated mass-surveillance solutions.

Hard drive encryption makes this difficult.

Take photo of screen with phone camera, carry it home, OCR. If you're really paranoid you don't want to send the document's bytes off your system or use any unusual program (e.g. steganography) to edit them.

It will always be a game of cat and mouse. Your protections for leaking are limited to legal whistleblower protections against retaliation, so odds are anything suggested here will potentially be traceable or suspicious, which may invite further scrutiny.

> Maybe emailing it to an outside address

Easily detected.

> sharing it as a document via Dropbox or similar

If you use a TLS-inspecting proxy/VPN, this will be detected. Otherwise, it depends on how much monitoring is going on, but at best they could suspect it.

> Copying to physical storage?

At my work, USB drives are disabled by MDM.

You could use transfer the files over SSH. Even if you have an MitM SSH-inspecting VPN, once the SSH channel is established, you could tunnel a second SSH connection through the established insecure SSH session.

Even then, with enough logging, you could detect that all local files were accessed sequentially which would raise a red flag.

There's nothing you can do to prevent insider espionage that wouldn't raise false positives and block legitimate work, but you could at least detect it.

Sheesh, Tesla FSD would be even worse than the "secret Coca-Cola formula", no one would even want to be in the same computer with it.

Now, production cost figures and schedules ...

Or take A picture of the letter Or retype the letter using leaker’s own smartphone.

Ironically, we had an employee appear to exfiltrate data through a print shop. They almost got away with it unnoticed.

The USB stick they used to make the transfer contracted ransomware from the public terminal, which put everyone on high alert when it was next introduced into the corporate network.

Is that so unlikely? They would be on the same network, same configuration.

I would imagine any two computers at Tesla have a very good chance of having identical normal.dot, and font can be determined by looking at the letter. For a letter, who is using tabs for anything but the start of paragraphs? Even if it's not perfect, it's unlikely to change the size of a word document (which is likely <25 kB to begin with) by a full kilobyte.

Basically all it would tell you is the number of word documents with approximately the same amount of text were printed, plus or minus about a paragraph. Letters aren't frequently printed and the contents of the leak would almost certainly limit the number of suspects to a small handful of people. It's not hard at all to believe that in a group of ~50 people and a time window of ~1 week you might only have one even close match.

> I take this story similar to the binary coded space story: more likely to be apocryphal and promoted to deter future leakers than true stories about catching them in the past.

Or have a printer at home on stand-by for your leak press releases. If I were Musk, I would have fired him not for being a snitch, but for his/her sloppiness and overall carelessness and lack of discipline.

It's probably not the only bit of evidence. "Hmm, it's about the same size, it was printed at about the right time and... yeah it sounds like *that* guy, let's see what else he printed - oh, nothing? Cool."

You could filter on time and size and then get a subset of likely candidates and whittle it down to the expected people.

It is also possible he's just a lunatic who fired an innocent person.

Looking at twitter these days I sure have a feeling this is not super unlikely.

What are the odds that he calculated a certain number of bytes, and exactly one other employee had sent a file to the printer that contained that number, but it was just a coincidence? If the method indeed doesn't work (as you suggest "is possible") it's impossible it would turn up a false positive, only a false negative.

almost as good as the odds that he got something pretty close, then changed the details a bit to fit the narrative.

or, he stayed up for two days until he got it exactly to match by tweaking his approach a little at a time, and actually matched it to the right person. Honestly, he seems like he'd do this.

Sounds like a fun project any hacker would get distracted by.

You wouldn't do that though, would you? You'd type the thing up, print it, see that the printer received a 4.7 KB (or whatever) doc and look for a 4-6 KB doc the week of the leak, and then you have 100 documents to go through, rather than 100000.

It's also possible that he calculated the number of bytes, searched the logs, didn't find anything and then tweaked his numbers until something matched. And then fired that random person to make a statement and lied about how he found out who to fire.

I didn't mean to claim other than that anything is possible. I was just saying the original theory put forward wasn't internally logical.

This approach would work in isolation, but by failing to find the true leaker would result in them being empowered to leak more over time. Is there evidence that Tesla has a lot of regular leaks?

I would assume there was also at least a minor degree of due diligence, such as "Would this person actually have had the knowledge to write letter".

It'd be even easier than that. Walk to the person's desk and ask them to bring up the document that they printed on ${printer} at ${time}. If he can't produce a document of the correct size, he's your guy.

This is a good way to fire innocent employees who had the audacity to edit a document after they’ve printed it.

Or lying. When you are rich or famous people or in vogue socially let you get away with these stories e.g. Consider feynmans "I'm modest but look at my genius"-isms

Yeah exactly. My thought was he probably found the leaker in a much more mundane way, but being undeniably great at PR he decided to spice up the story with this little bit of detective work. It sounds so clever you want to believe it, even if it's pretty impractical(not impossible though!). You know what they say, don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.

More important is spreading the perception he was able to sleuth down who the leaker was, to deter future leakers.

If he had access to printer logs, he would know exactly what everyone printed and when they did it.

Networked printers store a lot of information about what is being printed.

In general a lot of metadata is kept, but very rarely is the full print content kept (though in some organizations it may be for security review). The difficulty here is figuring what metadata is relevant, in this case size was the most important.