Caution: Your Printer is a Government Spy
Click here: U.S. conspiracy to hide printer codes a risk to rightsFolks:
In today's Chicago Suntimes' commentary section, page 27 is this article which first appeared on the Center for Individual Freedom's website October 27th - see below.
"Taken together, these revelations provide yet another reminder that changing technologies increasingly put individual rights at risk. No one is suggesting that the U.S. Government intends to use the secret codes to stamp out dissent. But if vigilance is the eternal price of liberty, a massive government-instigated conspiracy to track the sources of printed materials ought to have us all standing up and taking notice."
So the next time you feed more paper into your printer, be sure to pat it on the side and repeat over and over this mantra....
"I spy with my little eye......"
"I spy with my little eye......"
"I spy with my little eye......"
"I spy with my little eye......"
Peace and God Bless,
Fred Smart
A Note from "Bob":
What this means to me is NEVER 'register' an electronic communications device with the manufacturer; You know, the little folded piece of card stock in the plastic envelope with the instructions. Oh, get the 'what of my warranty' frown
off of your face. Your warranty started the moment you paid for
the device and cannot, by law, be tied to a response from you on a
little 'tracking' questionnaire.
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/printer-tracking-codes.htm
If vigilance is the eternal price of liberty, a massive government-instigated conspiracy to track the sources of printed materials ought to have us all standing up and taking notice.leftContents('story');
U.S. conspiracy to hide printer codes a risk to rights
November 19, 2005
BY MARSHALL MANSON
It seems like there's a conspiracy theory for everything. For example, some say the government is controlling weather from a secret outpost in Alaska. Others believe that Leonardo da Vinci littered his creations with clues that Jesus Christ married 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.
Sound absurd? There's just one problem. The last item is true.
PC World magazine first reported the news more than a year ago, and a senior research fellow at Xerox has 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 except by some tech-heads at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Armed with the hints in the PC World article, they set about trying to break the code.
A couple of weeks ago, 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. When decoded, the dots reveal the date and time the item was printed and serial number of the printer that produced the page.
Armed with the serial number, the government can match the printer to a purchaser using the customer databases that manufacturers and distributors maintain.
The zeal and ingenuity of the Secret Service in its fight against counterfeiting is commendable. But the notion that the government can use hidden information to track down a particular printer user is disquieting. No one doubts that the Secret Service is employing the secret printer codes only to catch criminals. But when a spokesman says that only criminals need fear the codes, he misses the mark by a long way.
According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, the same codes were found on pages produced by printers around the world. Consider a dissident in China, printing anonymous leaflets to stir the cause of freedom. The secret printer codes would allow the authoritarian Chinese government to track down and silence that dissident.
Think the manufacturers would stand firm and refuse to surrender the consumer information? Don't be so sure. First, the Chinese have hackers too, and presumably, some work for their government. It's not unreasonable to believe that they could simply steal the information. Second, we've already seen major international corporations cave in to Chinese government demands in order to preserve their access to the massive Chinese market. The most notable example is Yahoo!, which agreed to restrict access to certain Internet content that the Chinese government found objectionable.
Equally disturbing is the realization that the U.S. government actively conspired for years with major manufacturers, many of which are not American. This conspiracy occurred without public disclosure, much less public discussion.
And don't think for a moment that the conspiracy is limited to the United States. News reports say the Dutch government used the secret printer codes in Canon products to combat the mass counterfeiting of train tickets.
Taken together, these revelations provide yet another reminder that changing technologies increasingly put individual rights at risk. No one is suggesting that the U.S. government intends to use the secret printer codes to stamp out dissent. But if vigilance is the eternal price of liberty, a massive government-instigated conspiracy to track the sources of printed materials ought to have us all standing up and taking notice.
Marshall Manson is senior vice president of public affairs at the Center for Individual Freedom, www.cfif.org.
