alt Hacker News> Spymarks are certainly not great for whistleblowers or anyone who doesn’t want to be persecuted for their words or affiliations. No matter where you stand on whatever issues, spymarks can be used against you and those you care about.
How do you spymark text that someone else wrote? You can't change the words or they'd notice
"Text someone else wrote" is already self-watermarking if it's long enough. The infamous "six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men" may not be enough to hang someone over it, but apparently it's more than enough to uniquely identify them by word choices alone.
Text the whistleblower only reports on, well, if they got it from a computer system, there's already precedent of altering word choices, typos and punctuation in e-mails and memos to create unique per-recipient or per-recipient-group versions, which allows companies to trace leaked transcripts reported by press back to source of the leak.