This sort of communication was widely used during WWII and afterwards, notably during the Cold War. The tiny dots used by the Germans were often simply bits of unencrypted text miniaturised to the size of a full-stop. The Allies intercepted these messages, however, and disrupted the mission. German spies in Mexico were found to have taped tiny dots inside the envelope concealing a memo for contacts in Lisbon.Īt the time, these spies were operating undercover and were trying to get materials from Germany, such as radio equipment and secret ink. The NSA itself points to a fascinating historical example of tiny dots forming messages – from World War Two. READ MORE: The secret codes on banknotes.In an effort to avoid counterfeiting, many photocopiers and scanners are programmed not to produce copies of the banknotes when this pattern is recognised. Slightly more famously, many banknotes around the world feature a peculiar five-point pattern called the Eurion constellation. Similar kinds of steganography – secret messages hidden in plain sight – have been around for much longer. If you do encounter microdots on a document at some point, the EFF has an online tool that should reveal what information the pattern encodes. “If they get a document and someone says it’s from 2005, it’s from the last several months.” “People could use this to check for forgeries,” he explains. Shortly after a story about the leak was published, charges against Winner were made public. In an affidavit, the FBI alleges that Winner admitted printing the National Security Agency (NSA) report and sending it to The Intercept. In order to track down Winner, agents claim they had carefully studied copies of the document provided by online news site The Intercept and noticed creases suggesting that the pages had been printed and “hand-carried out of a secured space”. They had spent the last two days investigating a top secret classified document that had allegedly been leaked to the press. On 3 June 2017, FBI agents arrived at the house of government contractor Reality Leigh Winner in Augusta, Georgia. What you won’t find is any reference to, well, you-know-what. You’ll find everything from the story about the world’s greatest space mission to the truth about whether our cats really love us, the epic hunt to bring illegal fishermen to justice and the small team which brings long-buried World War Two tanks back to life. We’ll be revisiting our most popular features from the last three years in our Lockdown Longreads.
So now we’re dedicating a series to help you escape. BBC Future has brought you in-depth and rigorous stories to help you navigate the current pandemic, but we know that’s not all you want to read.