Your Printer is a Government Spy

http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/printer-trackin...

It seems like there’s a Conspiracy theory for everything. The government is controlling weather from a secret outpost in Alaska. Intelligence agencies are covertly capturing and reading every e-mail and monitoring every Cell Phone call around the globe. Leonardo da Vinci littered his creations with clues that Jesus Christ wedded Mary Magdalene.

And those sound downright believable compared to this one: The government conspired with manufacturers to hide a secret code on every page generated by a color printer or copier.

Sounds absurd, doesn’t it?

There’s just one problem. The last item is true.

PC World magazine first reported the news more than a year ago. “According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machine produce.”

A senior research fellow at Xerox confirmed the report and revealed that his company’s method for hiding the information was a pattern of tiny yellow dots. The dots’ size and color make them almost impossible to spot with the naked eye. The U.S. Secret Service also confirmed the existence of the hidden codes, but assured PC World, “The only time any information is gained from these documents is purely in the case of a criminal act.” Specifically, the agency said, to assist its efforts in combating counterfeiting and document forgery.

The magazine’s scoop passed nearly unnoticed at the time, except by some tech-heads at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Armed with the hints in the PC World article, they set about trying to break the code.

A couple of weeks ago, using a microscope, a blue light, and some basic computer programming skills, they succeeded.

And while they were at it, they identified similar codes produced by products from other printer and copier manufacturers including Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Konica/Minolta, Lexmark, Tektronix and others.

In the case of Xerox, a small rectangular group of dots is repeated about every inch along the page. The pattern of the dots represents a set of numbers presented in binary code. When decoded, the dots reveal the date and time the item was printed and serial number of the printer which produced the page.

Armed with the serial number, the government can match the printer to a purchaser using the customer and product databases that manufacturers and distributors maintain.

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