As more and more meetings take place over the videoconferencing service Zoom, it stands to reason that journalists will receive more and more audiovisual material leaked from such gatherings. This new leak medium poses unique challenges, requiring care to avoid exposing sources through digital watermarks or images of the user interface.
At least one Zoom leaker has already been unmasked: a member of the New York State Assembly who apparently filmed his “self-view” while recording a dispute within the Democratic assembly conference over the renomination of the speaker. That may sound careless, but a feature developed by Zoom will allow future leakers to be exposed even without that sort of misstep.
Many users may not realize it, but Zoom has the capability to insert both video and audio watermarks into a meeting.
Video/audio watermark options in the Zoom settings panel.
Screenshot: The Intercept
Zoom meeting scheduler video/audio watermark settings. (The individual meeting scheduler options appear after watermarking has been enabled via the main settings panel.)
Screenshot: The Intercept
The video watermarks are readily perceptible to meeting participants. When enabled, the video watermarking feature superimposes the username portion of each participant’s email address over the content they are viewing when another participant shares their screen and places the same watermark over the current active speaker. Because the video watermark appears across the entirety of the video frame, blurring may adversely impact the visibility of the underlying material.
In contrast, the audio watermarks are not readily perceptible to casual listeners, though they are what in watermarking parlance is known as “overt.” That means the fact that they are embedded is easily discerned by meeting participants: When a Zoom meeting has the audio watermark, or what Zoom also calls the “audio signature,” feature enabled, the meeting will have a green circular icon with a sound wave and a padlock at the top left of the frame next to the encryption icon.
The presence of the circular audio watermark icon next to the encryption shield icon is an indicator that the audio of the meeting is watermarked.
Screenshot: The Intercept
It is not immediately apparent at what point Zoom injects its “ultrasonic” audio watermark into the audio stream — whether this happens only if a meeting attendee presses the Record button in Zoom or if the audio stream is watermarked prior to that point. Nonetheless, when recording a Zoom meeting, it is best to avoid using Zoom’s built-in recording option and to capture the meeting using a third-party audio/video recorder. Zoom mentions that in order to identify the participant who recorded the meeting, they need at least two minutes of audio from the meeting, though it stands to reason that shorter snippets may also be identifiable if they happen to contain the audio watermark.
Journalists should also be wary of publishing raw audio leaked from Zoom meetings, particularly if the source is not sure whether audio watermarking was enabled or not.
Aside from Zoom’s own watermarks, a number of elements appearing on an individual’s own device may inadvertently give away the identity of the person who is recording. If the meeting video is being recorded either via screen recording software or a camera, there are a number of elements to watch out for. For example:
The video layout order should be manually rearranged.
Zoom meetings present a unique set of challenges for source protection, but these challenges can be minimized by following best practices and taking care not to publish raw meeting materials unless there is high confidence that the recordings were not watermarked and have been thoroughly reviewed to make sure no other potentially identifying features are present in the audio or video.