Leak Ledger is our weekly roundup of leaked documents, images and video. Five stories this week: a draft and a memo that went to known groups, two sets of records said to come from computer systems, and an insider case that rests on allegations.
Draft of the EU's Digital Fairness Act reaches Euronews before its presentation
Euronews reported from a draft of the Commission's consumer-protection overhaul two days before it was due to be presented, and a spokesperson said the Commission does not comment on leaks. A pre-adoption draft goes to a limited circle, which is the setting where a per-recipient watermark is most useful: if the file itself surfaces, detection points to the copy it came from. If a reporter is only shown the draft or told what it says, there is nothing to detect.
Source: Euronews
Records hackers say they took from Rosstat count more than 11,000 foreign deaths in Russia's war
Bloomberg analyzed death records from Russia's statistics agency that hacker groups say they took in a cyberattack, and counted more than 11,000 foreign-born or foreign-national fighters among the dead; Rosstat says it found no evidence its databases were compromised or confidential information leaked. If the records were pulled out of a database, they were never issued to anyone as a copy, so a watermark has nothing to say about where they came from.
Source: Bloomberg
Stephen Miller's memo on lobbyist meetings reaches Politico
Politico obtained a memo from Stephen Miller telling White House staff they need approval from the White House Counsel's office before meeting registered lobbyists about policy at the White House complex. A rule sent to a whole staff was always likely to get out. If it went as text in an email, it carried no watermark; a watermarked attachment for each staffer would only say whose copy surfaced, and only if the file itself did.
Source: Politico
TSMC says employee data was posted on an outside website
In a filing, TSMC says data on some current and former employees was made available on an external website without authorization, that it matches data stored in a cloud service provider's systems, and that so far it has found no evidence its own systems were compromised. Personnel records held in a system aren't copies handed to a person, so a per-recipient watermark would not help trace this.
Source: TSMC filing with the SEC
SEC and prosecutors charge a law firm document specialist with insider trading
The SEC's complaint alleges that Chetram Balli, who worked as a document processing specialist at a large international law firm, traded in at least eight companies' shares ahead of deals, using confidential information he had access to through his job; federal prosecutors filed a parallel criminal case, and he is presumed innocent. Nothing in the complaint says a document left the firm. A watermark traces a copy that turns up somewhere, not what someone does with what they read, so it would not have flagged this.
Why it matters
Only two of this week's five stories involve a file sent to a known group: a draft circulated before adoption and a memo to White House staff. The other three are about systems and people with access: records said to be taken from a government database, employee data that matched a vendor's systems, and an employee accused of trading on what he read.
When each recipient gets a copy with its own invisible watermark, detection reads the unique forensic ID from a leaked file, and you match it to the recipient you recorded. That covers documents, images and video. It doesn't cover audio, retyped or relayed text, records taken from a database, or information someone acts on without sharing a file, and it doesn't stop a leak. Our guide to invisible watermarking covers where it works and where it doesn't.