For years, governments all over the world have secretly been collaborating with the high-end color laser printer industry in order to track the origin of every color copy made.

They're doing it by programming the printers to create specific patterns of yellow dots - not visible to the naked eye - on every copy. These dot patterns are codes for the serial number, the make of the printer, and possibly even the time and date when the print was made. By cross-checking this information with printer company databases of people who have purchased the printers, federal agents can figure out who made a given color copy (of, say, an antiwar rally flyer) and when.

No, really.

Xerox has openly admitted it shares its customer lists with the US Secret Service if asked. And both the US Secret Service and the Dutch government told PC World in a recent article that they asked printer companies to create the yellow dot patterns to help law enforcement track down counterfeiting suspects. Because color laser copies are so good, counterfeiters frequently use them to create fake money, as well as fake train tickets and other valuable items.

Right now, the system works because most people don't know about it, and you can only see the yellow dots if you look at the paper under a blue light (to highlight the yellow). Generally you need a magnifying glass or a weak microscope too. It also works because color laser printers are high-end enough that most people buy them using credit cards. That's how the laser printer companies generate their lists of purchasers associated with specific printer serial numbers.

Robert Lee, a computer science student, spent the summer after graduating from Yale researching these yellow printer dots, trying to figure out which companies were using them and what they might mean. My coworkers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) helped him along, giving legal and technical pointers along the way. The result of two months spent peering at color laser copies with a blue LED was the discovery that only one model in his study doesn't use the yellow dots: the Xerox TekTronix Phaser 7700. But most other Xerox models do, as do all the ones he tested by Canon and Toshiba.

Because so little is known about what the yellow dots mean (aside from containing the make and serial number) and how governments are using them, many disturbing questions arise. For example, how do we know they're only using these printer marks to track counterfeiters? What if they're also tracking people who copy what they think are anonymous political flyers or pamphlets? Or people who post flyers announcing meetings of Muslim groups?

One of the fundamental ways the First Amendment works is by protecting anonymous free speech. These dots undermine your ability to make a color copy anonymously. The government can most likely track the document back to you. Even if you pay cash for color printouts at Kinko's, your purchase or visit to the store will probably be recorded by a security camera. It appears that the dots may contain a time stamp, so it would be relatively easy to cross-reference video of a 5:15 p.m. purchase with some copies made at 5:12.

How can this happen? Shouldn't there be a law? Yes, there should be, but as of now there are absolutely no regulations or laws that stop printer companies or copy shops from giving information about their customers to the government. Phone companies and Internet service providers, by contrast, are forbidden to give the government data about you unless served with a court order. But this isn't true for credit card records kept by laser printer companies. Sure, these companies could demand court orders, but none of them have. Xerox told Lee that it has always been happy to comply with the government when asked for this kind of data.

But there is something you can do about it, besides writing angry letters to your local congresscritter. Seth Schoen of the EFF is continuing Lee's work, gathering as many color copies as he can (see EFF's page on copiers), and he's received 200 responses so far, from all over the world. He's analyzing the patterns of dots, trying to crack the code to figure out what they say. Most of all, he and Lee want the public to know what they're getting when they print color copies.

Each time you create something on a color laser printer, you're sending a little message to the government: Here's who I am, and here's how to find me.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who prefers blue dots.

Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents

Practice Embeds Hidden, Traceable Data in Every Page Printed

By: Jason Tuohey - Medill News Service

WASHINGTON - Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printed there that could be used to trace the document back to you.

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 machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.

Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.

"It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.

The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light--say, from a keychain laser flashlight--on your page and use a magnifier.

Crime Fighting vs. Privacy

Laser-printing technology makes it incredibly easy to counterfeit money and documents, and Crean says the dots, in use in some printers for decades, allow law enforcement to identify and track down counterfeiters.

However, they could also be employed to track a document back to any person or business that printed it. Although the technology has existed for a long time, printer companies have not been required to notify customers of the feature.

Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeiting specialist with the U.S. Secret Service, stresses that the government uses the embedded serial numbers only when alerted to a forgery. "The only time any information is gained from these documents is purely in [the case of] a criminal act," she says.

John Morris, a lawyer for The Center for Democracy and Technology, says, "That type of assurance doesn't really assure me at all, unless there's some type of statute." He adds, "At a bare minimum, there needs to be a notice to consumers."

If the practice disturbs you, don't bother trying to disable the encoding mechanism--you'll probably just break your printer.

Crean describes the device as a chip located "way in the machine, right near the laser" that embeds the dots when the document "is about 20 billionths of a second" from printing.

"Standard mischief won't get you around it," Crean adds.

Neither Crean nor Pagano has an estimate of how many laser printers, copiers, and multifunction devices track documents, but they say that the practice is commonplace among major printer companies.

"The industry absolutely has been extraordinarily helpful [to law enforcement]," Pagano says.

According to Pagano, counterfeiting cases are brought to the Secret Service, which checks the documents, determines the brand and serial number of the printer, and contacts the company. Some, like Xerox, have a customer database, and they share the information with the government.

Crean says Xerox and the government have a good relationship. "The U.S. government had been on board all along--they would actually come out to our labs," Crean says.

History

Unlike ink jet printers, laser printers, fax machines, and copiers fire a laser through a mirror and series of lenses to embed the document or image on a page. Such devices range from a little over $100 to more than $1000, and are designed for both home and office.

Crean says Xerox pioneered this technology about 20 years ago, to assuage fears that their color copiers could easily be used to counterfeit bills.

"We developed the first (encoding mechanism) in house because several countries had expressed concern about allowing us to sell the printers in their country," Crean says.

Since then, he says, many other companies have adopted the practice.

The United States is not the only country teaming with private industry to fight counterfeiters. A recent article points to the Dutch government as using similar anticounterfeiting methods, and cites Canon as a company with encoding technology. Canon USA declined to comment.

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Source 1: Alternet.org

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