Secret Codes in Printers May Allow Government Tracking

Published on Tuesday, October 25, 2005 by Agence France Presse
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1025-08.htm



Tiny dots produced by some laser printers are a secret code that can allow the government to track down counterfeiters, a new study concludes, raising the hackles of privacy advocates.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said its researchers recently broke the code behind the tiny tracking dots and said the US Secret Service confirmed that the tracking is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers to identify counterfeiters.

"We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer," said EFF researcher Seth Schoen.

EFF said the yellow dots are less than one millimeter in diameter and can be seen only with a blue light, magnifying glass or microscope.

etc....
at top link

gov't orders net telephon services establish monitoring capability to help the FBI

A new government order will force some internet telephony services to establish a central monitoring capability to help the FBI. But where does that leave peer-to-peer phone companies?


02:00 AM Oct. 20, 2005 PT
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,69277,00.html?tw=wn_2polihead





I'm not sure if this was the story I heard tonight on the radio
or not. If I hear it again, I'll post it in this same thread.

Reasons to be nervous?
US history. FBI history.
COINTELPRO - spying and actively disrupting anti-war groups in the 60s
and other groups, also fbi did the same in the 80s to CISPES (Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) after this sort of abuse was supposedly in the past.

Interesting and not terribly surprising at all, I thought this was already being done with inkjet printers as well...

I guess I shouldn't really be surprised either.

or more cynical? :
After hearing such stories as CIA "intern" working at CNN & NPR (National Public Radio)
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2001/3.html
And there being a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King Jr
http://www.courttv.com/archive/trials/mlk-civil/120899_verdict_ctv.html


Is there some 'corporate' reason for dating the printouts?
You'd think the heavy users of shredders wouldn't want dates like that?

any effective shredder would make it practically impossible to find a dot smaller than 1mm to date a single sheet of a couple thousand pages in a garbage bag full of confetti... There might be a beneficial corporate use for this kind of thing, sort of like a timestamp watermark for all the printed documents. I think the average person doesn't have much to worry about from something like this, unless they're either super paranoid or doing something of questionable legality.

I'm not sure about the conspiracy theories or anything, most of this kind of stuff is plausible but not provable, which really makes it mere speculation at this point. If there's a chance of proof being out there, whoever perpetrated the conspiracy will likely do whatever is necessary to hush things up.

I wouldn't be surprised either. It doesn't bother me too much ... perhaps it's actually a useful thing in many ways (given what some folks use their printers for these days) - or am I being naive again?

On a related subject - it's quite alarming what you can do with vector graphics! I use AutoCAD at work every day - and just to see if it could be done, a few months ago I scaled down an intricate technical drawing of a construction project .... and pasted it into the period/full stop of a piece of text in another drawing ...... emailed it home ... blew it up, printed it ... in full detail, no lost data ... the whole shebang!

James Bond never had it so good!

?W????

Holy Cow Sensuikan San,

That's exactly what the CIA used to do, according to former officer Phil Agee who left the agency after 12 years in disgust and wrote about it in "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary".

But they had to use film.
It musta been mega time consuming and frustrating.
But they did just like you said, take a picture of a document
then shrink it down to the size of a dot on an " i " then paint over it.

Now it can be done by anybody with a computer and curiosity.
Kinda cool actually. (not the CIA's dirty tricks, but the Bond-esque stuff)

Sukotto said:

Holy Cow Sensuikan San,

That's exactly what the CIA used to do, according to former officer Phil Agee who left the agency after 12 years in disgust and wrote about it in "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary".

But they had to use film.
It musta been mega time consuming and frustrating.
But they did just like you said, take a picture of a document
then shrink it down to the size of a dot on an " i " then paint over it.

Now it can be done by anybody with a computer and curiosity.
Kinda cool actually. (not the CIA's dirty tricks, but the Bond-esque stuff)

Click to expand...

Yeah - I'd heard about that ... that's what prompted me to 'give it a whirl'!

And BTW - just for a laugh - I tried it again today! Easy!

It also occured to me that it might probably be extremely difficult to uncover or discover something like that! By playing around with the 'layers' etc. etc. anyone with co-ordinates could recover the info no problem. But to anybody else - it could be virtually undectectable.

If anybody out there has AutoCAD - I invite them to assist in a little experiment on this one ... any takers....?

?W????