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> The fact that neither Apple nor Amazon sued Bloomberg for defamation—despite being extremely rich, finicky, and litigious—made nary a dent

For private individuals, the thresholds for defamation lower. But for public officials, and corporations defamation is nearly impossible to prove. It's not enough to prove that the statements made were false, it's also necessary to prove that they were made with malicious intent. Unless there's some bombshell piece of evidence, like journalists actively conspiring to tear down a target, the journalists can just say "well, we were just writing a piece interesting for our readers."

The 9-0 supreme court case that set this precedence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan

Not to mention that suing over something like that would just have called attention to it. There's no universe in which Apple or Amazon would actually benefit from filing that kind of lawsuit even if they won it. And there are relatively few universes in which whoever was making the decision would be dumb enough to think they'd benefit.

Only reason for them to fill such suit is if they were malicious and wanted the other party to waste time, money and resources... Not exactly something that is good corporate leadership. Or even good for their shareholders.

> were made with malicious intent

That's not what "actual malice" means. Actual malice means:

> with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not

So its not just that they wanted to harm the person, but that they took reckless disregard to whether it was true or not. Essentially, writing something without even doing a bit of fact finding to try and support it would be considered "actual malice". You don't need to prove the defendant wanted to harm the person being libeled, just that they didn't care whether or not what they were saying was true or not.

> The 9-0 supreme court case that set this precedence:

Small nitpick: a decision is not precedent until it is 1) challenged and 2) survives the challenge. A decision in isolation without seeing a challenge and also surviving that challenge is technically not precedent (though it still is the Law of the Land, precedence or not).

A decision absolutely is precedence before it's been challenged. Otherwise, there's be nothing to challenge - a challenge is an attempt to change the existing precedence and create a new status quo on something.

You are mistaken. Say a lower court delivers a ruling. That is not precedent, but it is the Law of the Land until overturned. Say an appeals court upholds that ruling... then the ruling becomes precedent. If never challenged, it isn't precedent, merely the law. Roe was the law of the land but didn't establish precedence until upheld in Casey. If precedent occurred on the initial ruling, that ruling could never be challenged as courts are compelled to uphold precedent of previous rulings until such time as challenges reach a higher court and are overturned.

> That is not precedent, but it is the Law of the Land until overturned.

The fact that a ruling sets the law of the land is what precedence means. It means other rulings follow the previous, preceding rulings.

Roe absolutely was precedence before Casey - that's why abortion was legal in the 1970s and 1980s before Casey v. Planned Parenthood.

Roe was law, certainly, but only after Casey were courts compelled to treat it as established precedent as the findings in Roe were reasserted. Prior to Casey, Roe had not been seriously challenged in a way that would affect Roe. Casey upheld Roe, establishing Roe as precedent. If today, the Supreme Court issued a finding overturning Roe, it would be law, but that would not establish any precedent. It would be ignoring precedent. But subsequently if this new ruling overturning Roe was challenged and upheld, only then does it become precedent.

Not every finding of the Supreme Count or any court establishes precedent. Only the findings upholding previous cases allow those previous cases to become precedent. Otherwise, the word "precedent" becomes superfluous and has no distinct meaning from "the law."

That's an interesting point!

It's not really, it's a misunderstanding of both the US defamation legal landscape and the typical behaviour of large corporations in such circumstances. A news org getting a story wrong is not defamation and statistically nobody sues over stuff like that because it's nigh-impossible to win.

And whether or not we ever know the truth, such as it is, it's pretty clear to me that the companies involved sincerely believe their positions at an executive level and that BBW editors really believe their position for whatever reason. The whole thing is very strange.

> A news org getting a story wrong is not defamation

Exactly, and neither is a journalist outright lying as long as it's not harming someone's reputation. I have no idea why the author says: "I trust the journalists, because there are still serious legal consequences for news organizations that publish falsehoods"

There are zero legal consequences for news organizations who knowingly lie and mislead as long as they do it with a little bit of care.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

The visibility section of the wiki link suggests that they may be resilient. They are printed using a low visibility color (light shade of yellow) which can be made visible via post processing. While they do note using a high resolution scanner, I suspect that could be made less important by building redundancy into the MIC, a la how QR codes can function well despite having portions be damaged or missing.

I wonder if anyone has looked at the leak for a MIC/yellow dots. It contains a color channel (see highlighting) so it is plausible it could, even if re-scanned.

I quickly isolated the blue channel of the document and ramped up the saturation (which should emphasize yellows), but I can't find any obvious dots (even at 10x zoom). AFAIK it's not the only method in use though, just the most well known.

I checked it and failed to find any. Though if it was scanned from a color print its very likely that they were there in the paper version-- they just may not have survived scanning.

I imagine the Supreme Court is an environment where everyone prints everything. Everyone is in their 50s (some in their 70s) and they probably print and annotate everything manually. I imagine there are copies of everything floating around and picking one up and making another copy wouldn't be all that difficult.

I also wouldn't assume Politico has full staff in office yet, and it wouldn't surprise me if they made a scan-of-a-handed-off-copy on a personal device to get to their web staff. It's pretty brave of them putting it online as a scan still, I think I'd have retyped or taken closer care to crop out the edges and all that just in case (source: Am journalist.) But maybe they handed it to someone in digital forensics and ensured any sort of microdots were stripped out. I worry about words being switched on a per-copy basis as a trap (Tom Clancy used it as a plot device ages ago and it stuck with me,) so maybe they knew it was a copy that floated around and couldn't be traced, or they're not as paranoid as me.

>>I worry about words being switched on a per-copy basis as a trap

So you support leaking Supreme Court draft opinions and prefer leakers not be caught?

You realize the consequences of legitimizing this for the rule of law, right? If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.

This is already a much bigger problem than this leak. Selective enforcement of drug laws is rife in the us. Are you also concerned about that?

A leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion is an extraordinary breach of judicial confidentiality protocols and severely damages the integrity of the highest court.

Are you saying that the rule of law is already so degraded in other areas that further degrading it with this kind of action is of no consequence and therefore if it happens to advance what you consider to be a good policy then we should welcome it?

Given that it all revolves around allowing states to turn a Christian fundamentalist idea into a criminal law, I’d say the idea of “rule of law” is long gone.

You've found a way to rationalize undermining rule of law, by arguing that this exercise of the law is.. not the law.

Like I said at the start: If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.

The idea of keeping religion out of law is not "one political platform".

If the law is working against the society - like in this case - then it needs to be fixed, not blindly obeyed.

There are more than religious arguments for prohibiting abortion and the Supreme Court draft opinion on Roe vs Wade has zero religious argument contain therein.

Beyond that, the law says the Supreme Court and legislature decides what is or isn't a violation of the separation of Church and State, not activists deciding for themselves what law should or should not be observed.

>>If the law is working against the society - like in this case - then it needs to be fixed, not blindly obeyed.

There is a legal process for changing the law. What you are attempting to justify is undermining the rule of law with haphazard rationalizations.

No, there are no logically valid, non-religious arguments for prohibiting abortion. That’s the point: abortion ban is not “a view”; it’s a moral equivalent of antivax. It means one is either misinformed, or lacks basic ethics. You’ve just demonstrated that yourself, by ignoring the fact that the draft opinion quoted a professional witch hunter and marital rape apologist.

Beyond that - the courts exist for a reason, because of the mandate given by society. When the society realizes they aren’t working properly, it should be possible to fix said courts.

And no, in US there is no working legal process for fixing the court, even in very obvious cases, like a judge protecting its wife, or just being a straight out human waste, like Scalia.

>>No, there are no logically valid, non-religious arguments for prohibiting abortion.

There are so many reasons why this is wrong.

Under the Constitution, the tenth amendment clearly reserves powers not expressly enumerated for the federal government, to the people and states, and the only exception to that is powers expressly denied by the Constitution to the states, which defining human life as beginning before birth is not one of them.

Moreover, defining human life as starting at a heartbeat or before birth can be an entirely secular belief, your dogmatism denial notwithstanding.

>>You’ve just demonstrated that yourself, by ignoring the fact that the opinion was based on works of a professional witch hunter and marital rape apologist.

This is just ad hominem / character assassination, and not relevant to this point.

>>When the society realizes they aren’t working properly, it should be possible to fix said courts.

And you're arguing for fixing said courts through illegal acts. Like I said:

If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.

>>And no, in US there is no working legal process for fixing the court, even in very obvious cases, like a judge protecting its wife, or just being a straight out human waste, like Scalia.

Of course there is a way to fix the courts: legislation can dictate the jurisdiction of courts, and legislatures can appoint new justices to the court, and the legislature is democratically elected.

Of course the latter takes time, as Supreme Court justices are lifetime appointments, but that is the Constitutional process, and that can also be changed if a supermajority vote for a Constitutional amendment.

Your expressions of hatred and disgust toward those who through the Constitutionally legitimate process, became Supreme Court justices, is not a moral argument. It's just a manifestation of the moral superiority complex exhibited by those on the political left who support this subversion of the law.

It doesn’t matter when human life starts: even assuming it started at fertilization, it wouldn’t override other person right to decide about their body. The law doesn’t force you to be a organ donor when it could save someone; this is the same situation.

Like I said - there are no logically valid arguments for abortion ban, other than strictly religious.

In case you forgot, numerous states forbid people from even going outside their home, and from perusing numerous services if they weren't vaccinated. This was restricting people's bodily autonomy under duress, to theoretically reduce the spread of a virus with a 99.5% infection survival rate. On the basis of prevailing legal norms, an entirely secular argument could absolutely be made for not allowing the eviction of a person from their mother's womb, to their death.

We put mothers and mostly fathers in prison for not providing child support. The latter never even had an option to abort their parental responsibilities the way mothers did during pregnancy. The idea that a non-religious argument against abortion can't exist in light of this is absurd.

>>Like I said - there are no logically valid arguments for abortion ban, other than strictly religious.

Like I said, believing abortion should be prohibited can be an entirely secular belief, your dogmatic denial notwithstanding.

Entering public spaces because you’re potentially dangerous - because you are unvaccinated, are a sex offender, or you’re carrying a weapon - has nothing to do with bodily autonomy.

As for child support - again, nothing to do with bodily autonomy, because the same happens in other directions, for failing to support other family members one is required to, not just one’s children.

You still hadn’t managed to provide even a single secular reason to ban abortion. It’s not that they cannot exist - they perhaps could, but they don’t. “Prevailing legal norms” don’t matter, because they have been largely written to the tune of religious extremists; that’s where churches numerous privileges come from.

I wouldn't worry about words being switched. These are legislative documents and risk of such actions having long reaching consequences is real. Just think that such error would end up being released stored and distributed long term. It might change entire meaning of sections thus maybe even change some future lawsuits, not something you want to risk.

>If you color-scan a printed document at low-enough resolution, will it corrupt the color-printer dot patterns or are they resilient to that?

I think that if you used Fourier analysis, you could identify the frequency generally associated with the dot size, and delete the signal in that band. This can also be used to achieve excellent reduction of the Moiré effect:

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/moire-n...

https://ijournals.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/5.3106-Khanj...

This has the advantage of also not reducing the image quality as badly as when you try to blur the patterns away spatially.

I was thinking along those Reality Winner lines that if I were an organization today getting a leaked document like this, what I would do would be to print it and then scan it grayscale and post that. Thereby being sure to avoid issues of embedded metadata and probably making it at least harder to read things like sneaky printer codes. Not that I'd really expect the Supreme Court to use something like that, but just as a general principle. Obviously this wouldn't be foolproof (something as simple as having a subtly different version of that office routing "stamp" on page 1 for different recipients would suffice to narrow things down a lot) but good practice anyway.

Other than it being color, that's what I would have assumed was done here, except the staple holes and relatively decent image quality do seem to argue against it.

I've always thought that the best approach would be to embed some kind of steganographic identifier in the rendered text. Small variations in the spacing or even kerning.

The simplest way to get around that would be to retype the whole document, which is a bunch of friction. But to counter that, more invasively, the texts different people would get could be different themselves. Sentences subtly reordered, slight differences in word choice or spelling. Though that makes collaboration more difficult.

Less technical savvy but resourced organizations wouldn't face difficulty using those approaches. It could just be a bit that an IT admin toggles on the GSuite or MS Office admin panel.

> Sentences subtly reordered, slight differences in word voice or spelling. Though that makes collaboration more difficult.

I think that would make collaboration impossible. If that were standard practice collaboration would eventually uncover that was occurring, and a leaker would compensate.

IMHO that technique is only valid when the recipients can be assumed to not be in contact, or as an unusual thing to identify a leaker when one is already suspected.

> If that were standard practice collaboration would eventually uncover that was occurring, and a leaker would compensate.

I don't think that's really the issue. Let's suppose you have 64 employees with access to a doc. You can uniquely identify them with 6 bits in the doc. A doc of a couple pages would be more than enough to put in those bits, and many more. Even if you had two collaborators who shared docs for a word for word diff, they'd still miss half the identifying bits, which reduces the potential culprit pool to 8, and that's assuming zero redundancy.

The issue I imagine is more usability. Someone identifies one of those bits as content that should be changed: what happens when they suggest the edit?

> Even if you had two collaborators who shared docs for a word for word diff, they'd still miss half the identifying bits, which reduces the potential culprit pool to 8, and that's assuming zero redundancy.

That's not really what I'm talking about. It seems like you're focusing on identifying all the exact bits that are being used to identify someone, but that's not important. What is important is the recipients figuring out that someone is monkeying with the documents in a systematic way to trace them. Once a leaker knows that, instead of leaking the exact document for publication, they'd either leak reworded summary of key points themselves, or require the journalist to only publish something similar.

You could use OCR, and reproduce it as all ASCII. Apparently EVE Online guilds would start to put minor variations in the text of memos, or even alter critical information (like changing timing of convoys or attacks by a few minutes) to weasel out informants.

My facvorite was when the forum background image had the logged-in user encoded into it

Printers have done this since the 1980s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

That's the watermark, which is well known. Low resolution scans of the original document can counteract them (...I think...), so I'm brainstorming (dystopian) alternatives.

I misunderstood the intent it seems.

Why not OCR the document to limit traceability?

Sure you could do that too. You mean, just release it as text, I assume. It would certainly cut out a lot of possible methods of fingerprinting, leaving actual changes to the text only pretty much, which are probably not as common outside some limited scenarios.

I think the reason you don't do that is that things like the formatting and so on being accurate lend credibility to the document.

At the end of the day, credibility is a trust issue, and in the Photoshop era I don't think having the right header and the right formatting add much to the credibility.

Fewer potential clues but also less credibility I expect.

OCR also isn't going to be 100% though probably more than good enough in this case. If you really want to implement subtle tracking, you could make changes in the document itself that differ by recipient.

You either print and rescan and crop the edges, or you type it all out yourself. It'd be safest to never put it online at all other than paraphrased summaries. The next safest would be to just type it all out yourself in your own words, but it's pretty darn difficult to do when you've got legalese. Politico must have had reason to believe they're in the clear there. Maybe they had two copies or they knew their source got a shared copy that couldn't be traced. Journalists lose sleep over this.

> If you color-scan a printed document at low-enough resolution, will it corrupt the color-printer dot patterns or are they resilient to that?

It should be completely trivial to destroy any markings in the PDF. Black and white text in particular once scanned can just be thresholded and passed through filters. Heck it seems like a trivial application of deep learning to obfuscate text. For example, it would be interesting to train a transformer to learn degradation from multiple print/scan cycles using the same source using different printers and scanners so that it learns how to fake all sorts of imprecision.