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EFF Requests Help to Identify "Evil" Printers
jason writes "In preparation for a possible legal challenge, The Electronic Frontiers Foundation is requesting your help in identifying which printers are embedding traceable information in the documents they produce. Printer manufactures added this technology under persuasion from the government inorder to help combat counterfeiting operations, however this technology defeats the presumed anonymity most people expect from the documents they print."
I wonder if the government will be using these printers themselves, they have more to hide than anyone else. Now when a confidential document is leaked it can be more easily tied to a government official.
How exactly is this supposed to work? I buy a printer with cash from Office Max, take it home, and print some phony money. The money is reported to the secret service, which takes it to the printer manufacturer, which tells them that the printer was shipped to an Office Max in my town.
Assume I had the common sense to only use the printer for counterfeiting. What exactly do they do now? Get a warrant for every house within 50 miles of said Office Max, and check the serial number on all the printers?
Im sorry, but the word 'evil' is really being used far too much on slashdot to talk about stuff that isnt evil in anyway, shape or form. It reminds me of the RIAAs usage of the word 'steal', and both parties are using the words wrongly to provide a very specific view in other peoples minds of things that they personally do not like IMHO.
What kind of evil are we talking about here? The kind where replacement cartridges cost more than the printer itself? Or drivers that are fully supported under Windows but Linux requires black magic to work? Or that cables are not included?
It's nice to see the EFF trying to stamp out the evil printers. But there's a lot of work to be done.
Somebody ask
- Alexander Hamilton (later the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, the same Treasury that Lorelei Pagano now works for),
- James Madison (later fourth President of The United States), or
- John Jay (later first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court)
why they published the Federalist Papers anonymously under the name "Publius".Ask them if they'd have been able to write the these brilliant arguments that shaped the Constitution of the United States of America if the very paper they'd printed it on could have been used to strip then of their anonymity?
Could they have made their arguments as forcefully, would they have allowed their ideas to have been so revolutionary, if they had known any political opponent could trace those papers back to them, perhaps deny them jobs or political offices because of disagreement with their ideas?
Would we even have the Constitution that we have today if these great men had not been able to use the pen-name "Publius"?
Hamilton and Madison and Jay forged (ahem) our Constitution in anonymity, but counterfeiting specialist Lorelei Pagano tells us that those three silly boys didn't need their anonymity? That in order to be safe from counterfeiters, we have to give up our right to anonymous politically agitation?
How much more security can this country -- this nation conceived in anonymity -- survive?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
This administration is neither the first nor the last one to use law enforcement officers to harrass the opposition. Practical freedom of the press is undermined when it is too hard to write anonymously.
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't make it any less true.
You want to stop counterfitters? Design real money, instead of the single-colour, same sized bills that they keep making. Take the mom-and-pop operations out of the picture, then work on the foreign governments, and organized criminals.
Except the Evil is subjective and Steal has a definite meaning.
How do "most people expect anonymity from the documents they print?"
Printed pages are NEVER anonymous. Apart from fingerprints, DNA traces, ink and paper matching, how many people print stuff that they pass out anonymously? Most letters have a sender, books and other prints have a copyright note. And once you distribute any printed materials, others can trace it back.
If you go to the trouble to buy the printed at Best Buy at a best buy 500 miles from your home with cash that you got from a bank while wearing a full body condom and face mask, don't transport it in your car, and keep it in a clean room at an anonymous location, I agree that you probably expect privacy. But at that point, you have probably been arrested as a weirdo somewhere along the way.
I think many of you are missing the point here. This is NOT to be able to take a document and track it back to a specific printer, but rather to irrefutably link the document and the printer.
"They" will never find a counterfeit document and then look for the printer, they will find the printer and then link the documents printed as corroborating evidence. This will be used once a suspect is available and a with a search warrant present and the printer seized, now with the micro-dot encoded serial number they can prove that Document A was definitely printed on Xerox Model X3Y Serial number: sdf78s6d5sdf46s4df98 which resides in the office a Mr. John Q. Public. at 321 Main St. Spingfield, MA; this removes plausibly deniability from the case. No more will a printed document carry any form of anonymity, there will be no reasonable doubt if this is called into evidence at a trial, do you REALLY want an almost iron-clad evidence of every document printed to be available?
I understand the marking is done with yellow ink. It seems one would be able to expose a lot of these printers by replacing (or contaminating) the yellow ink with black.
The only time when I can see this being useful to the Government is if I'm doing something wrong. You know, harassing my ex, threatening the President, and that junk.
So, in your view, privacy is unimportant unless you have something to hide? In that same vein, if you want privacy, are you automatically a criminal?
Let's say the government wants to put a chip in your car that tracks your movements ("to fight terrrorism"), Do you have anything to hide then? Perhaps you're going to terrorist school... shouldn't the cops know about that? Why not place the chip directly in your arm just to be safe? Why not, then have everyone get permission from the government to move around the country? If they have nothing to hide, why should it be trouble to ask for permission? Why should people protest the actions of the government if they love their country? Perhaps they are criminals too.
The invasion of privacy is something we must always fight, because it's a slippery slope, and we will never get back what we once had. The loss of privacy means the death of democracy.
OK, so let me be sure I understand this.
You're telling me that your printers always include a dot, printed with yellow toner, visible only with an 8x magnifying glass, in which is encoded enough information for you to identify exactly which printer that you made was responsible for printing that page?
Sorry, but if that's all you've got, I call bullshit. Too much doesn't add up.
Printer manufacturers have high enough resolution to do this, yet only put out 600dpi/1200dpi boxes, where you can easily enough see jaggies with the naked eye?
If the dots are really that small, they could be messed up just by bleed in average quality printer paper.
Alternatively, this isn't a microdot in the classic meaning of the term, but rather the system is supposed to rely on the relative positions of the dots on the page, with dots spaced inches apart? How is that going to help fight conterfeiting? I don't know many bank notes that come in handy US letter or A4 size for counterfeiting convenience.
You say your department has never had to look up a serial number for the authorities, yet strangely according to TFA, the authorities seem to do this all the time with other makers?
Only a tiny number of people in your department know how to do this, it's all so secret that other printer manufacturers cited in TFA wouldn't even comment and you can't tell us how to find the things, yet you're prepared to identify your employer, thus practically waving a flag about who you are and the fact that you're willing to disclose this sort of information?
There's no obligation to register where you buy your printer, nor to notify anyone of selling it on, so there's nothing to connect to the serial number unless someone bothers transferring warranty information (even after the usually pretty naff warranty has expired).
And here's the kicker: governments all over the world use these things. If there were security marks being printed on their documents, they would know about it, not least because they all do it routinely with confidential documents themselves. How am I supposed to believe that government departments are allowed to use these things when anything they print could be traced back to exactly where it comes from by someone who isn't cleared by that government's security people, and works in another country?
Sorry, but this just doesn't ring true. There is absolutely no factual information in either TFA or all your posts to this thread that's good enough to reproduce this effect reliably, and what's more I'm looking at full-page print-outs from two colour printers, following the directions given in TFA, and unable to see anything even remotely resembling what's described.
I'm happy to change my view on this if more information is provided, but I'm very sceptical about this whole story right now.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.