Fresh from our tinfoil hat division, the U.S. Secret Service responded to a recent “Freedom of Information Act” (FOIA) request on Monday that reveals the names of the printer companies that cooperate with the government to identify and track potential counterfeiters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (an organization dedicated to preserving individuals rights in the digital age) revealed in 2005 that the Secret Service made arrangements with selected laser printer companies to identify and track printer paper using microscopic dots encoded into the paper. The tiny, yellow dots — less than a millimeter each — are printed in a pattern over each page and are only viewable with a magnifying glass, blue light, or a microscope. Up until now the public didn’t know how far the tracking program went, aside from what the EFF was able to discover by meticulously looking over printouts from different sources from around the country. The microdots are only present in color printers (black and white lasers have no way to produce yellow) but that isn’t to say that similar tracking programs are in place for non-color printers. Most printouts from a printer can be matched to the originating machine by the normal wear and tear on the drum and rollers.
What does this mean for the user? At the moment, not a thing, unless you try to commit a crime with your printer. Try and print a ransom note, or a fake $20 dollar bill, and they will be able to match what you printed to your printer by serial number, and the time (assuming the machine’s clock is set correctly – in my experience, many aren’t). The “location” isn’t really identified since these devices have no way of knowing their exact location, so what’s being described on the EFF article isn’t directly possible (unless you are one of the fantastic elite who not only commit crime, but send in your product registration cards that came with your printer). An exception to this is since more printers are networked, it is possible for the printer to be able to report the IP address from which your general location can be divined.
Advocates like the EFF worry that tracking systems like this could enable an oppressive regime to track and identify whistle-blowers, repressed religious minorities or opposing party members. Indeed in a situation like what has gone on in the Middle East in the past year with popular uprisings, if this kind of tracking technology was in the wrong hands it could have spelled disaster for anyone trying to anonymously raise awareness or protest against the government. With more anti-terrorism laws being brought in front of Congress and the House that could widen reasonable paranoia to near McCarthy-era levels, issues like this are something that we should keep an eye on.
If you’re going to be printing stuff you don’t want identified, don’t use one of these machines. Easy enough to avoid government dots; just don’t buy printers from Canon, Brother, Casio, Sharp, HP, Konica-Minolta, Mita, Ricoh, or Xerox. For day to day normal printing however, it’s not exactly going to affect you or your business.
