The invention provides a method of forensic digital watermarking that randomly selects an orientation and/or embedding protocol for a forensic digital watermark signal to be embedded in the content signal. It then embeds the forensic digital watermark signal at the selected orientation in the content signal. The embedding applies a different orientation to the digital forensic watermark for each instance of embedding a forensic watermark. This thwarts averaging and over-embedding attacks and enables generational forensic tracking.