Left In Lowell

My husband just sent me this Alternet article link. His email subject line says it all: Wow.

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.

Alternet is a trust-worthy source, though obviously slanted liberal. Even so, I had to read that paragraph twice and blink several times and I still didn’t believe it.

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.

Now, the ostensible reason for this is to prosecute counterfeiting. But just think…the possibility for abuse is endless.