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FOIA Request Shows Which Printer Companies Cooperated With US Government
New submitter Dave_Minsky writes "The U.S. Secret Service responded to a FOIA request on Monday that reveals the names of the printer companies that cooperate with the government to identify and track potential counterfeiters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed in 2005 that the U.S. Secret Service was in cahoots with selected laser printer companies to identify and track printer paper using tiny microscopic dots encoded into the paper. The tiny, yellow dots — less than a millimeter each — are printed in a pattern over each page and are only viewable with a blue light, a magnifying glass or a microscope. The pattern of dots is encodes identifiable information including printer model, and time and location where the document was printed." Easy enough to avoid government dots; just don't buy printers from Canon, Brother, Casio, HP, Konica, Minolta, Mita, Ricoh, Sharp, or Xerox.
Who would want to counterfeit american money? If you're gonna stick your neck out at least counterfeit something of value
Firstly, what's the big deal with the document having these microdots? They identify the machine by serial number, and the time (assuming the machine's clock is set correctly - in my experience, many aren't). The "location" isn't really identified since these devices have no way of knowing their location, so what's being described here isn't actually possible.
If you're going to be printing stuff you don't want identified, don't use one of these machines, sure. But for day to day normal printing, it's not exactly going to affect you.
I'm aware this argument sounds a lot like "if you've got nothing to hide, you don't need security" or whatever, but really it's not. If you DO want to hide that the job was printed on your device, change the serial number (on most devices, this just requires knowing how to get to the "Service Mode" of the machine - which, while no company will tell you how, is trivially easy to find on Google).
It's not like we actively keep it a secret that our machines do this.
And just as a minor nitpick: "Konica" and "Minolta" haven't been two separate companies in a long time. (Full disclosure: I work for Konica Minolta)
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Great to know my printer maker isn't on the list.
No worries, lexmark print quality is so horrid and their printers so unreliable who in their right mind would actually try to counterfeit anything using one?
Get a web developer
I've stopped using printers years ago. They're simply not needed anymore. Who cares if the US government is using them to secretly spy on you?
Don't stop where the ink does.
1) To find child pornographers ....
2) To find money counterfeiters
So, every 1,000,000th computer user is 1), and probably every 10,000,000th is 2).. Or something like. Nothing bad, I would propose much stricter sentencing for 1), and let authorities eat 2) for breakfast, and so on... But... 1) and 2) are probably verrry aware of methods used so only guaranteed effect is: surveillance and control of rest of us.
We (the rest) are just collateral damage - freedom here and freedom there is lost...
Nothing new here... :)
As for printer companies - Every single one not on this list is just temporarily off it. Why would they decline request like that from government? At least for printer sold in some country, it's only normal to expect its government to impose such request onto company willing to sell it's wares. While this situation is very similar to old reasoning for cryptography for our emails, I really don't see why it would be a problem to me if papers I produce are traceable by government? A lot of my writing is already in circulation so they also have many other ways to match my papers to me :).
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
it was just a "voluntary" request for cooperation.
(That means they had good old Joe Lieberman call up the company and "ask" them to print teh dots.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
So this is why my ink runs out so fast! Those dots are wasting my ink! I didn't authroize this use of my equipment! There should be disclaimers stating that the 500 pages that can be printed 2 of those pages of ink is used up just for the tracking!
Can't print green money on a B/W printer..
Are printers coming with Magical GPS systems now?
Cause last I checked, GPS doesnt work indoors, and a GPS system costs more than the price of an entry level printer
And, without GPS, how do they plan to get your location?
Also, where does the printer get an accurate time reading from, and how do you link a serial number to a person unless they take the printer in for servicing, or purchased it using their own credit card
Because I've been wondering for a while why the yellow ink was always disappearing faster than the other colors on our printers, I wonder if this accounts for some of the loss?
Really? This is cause for outrage? The insane idea that the government might look at something you wrote and hunt you down using a printer serial number and some possible registration information? This isn't a "the innocent have nothing to hide" argument, this is a "any government agency that actually used this for anything other than the stated purpose is insane" argument. There are hundreds of far more efficient, reliable and accurate ways to figure out who you are and what you have been up to.
Reading through the comments, about how your printer is going to betray you when the fascist power grab comes, it is abundantly clear that a sizable portion of slashdotters enjoy nothing more than working themselves up by finding whatever scant excuse to go on hyperbolic rants about how the government is just waiting to come and take them away to gitmo, and that the only way to avoid this is to compete to see who is the most paranoid.
The sad thing is when the government DOES overstep its bounds and quash our freedoms, these people will have negative credibility because everyone else know that, to them, everything is a sinister government plot.
The white paper reflects blue light while the yellow ink doesn't, so the dots would appear darker. Both ink and paper could fluoresce under UV, which would probably reduce contrast and make the dots harder to spot.
Blank until
I've worked rather extensively with a Xerox DocuColor 252 over the last four years. Those yellow dots are anything but microscopic. I could plainly see the dots on most printouts under standard office-style fluorescent lighting. They always bugged the crap out of me.
* chirp * chirp *
This probably helps explain why so many customers have brought printers to me complaining of the defect where B&W print jobs do not print when the color cartidge gets low.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Here's a partial list:
lexmark
Kodak
TVS Electronics
WeP
PENTAX
Planon
prolink
Olivetti
Epson
Lenovo
OKI
Panasonic
Dell
Samsung
Kyocera
Someone already made the bad printing quality joke so I won't bore you with it again.
Just buy a used printer off craigslist. No one will know you have it.
Never buy a used printer.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
One of the things a fully developed police state needs to be able to do is control the flow of all information. You need a mechanism that can be used to identify who has been producing physical copies of banned works - say, a play by Vaclav Havel, or a copy of The Master and Margarita - so that you can lock them up.
What these printer companies have done, by collaborating with the US in this way, is to make it easier for police states to monitor and control the physical flow of information.
... suggest a good utility for printing additional, obfuscating dots?
Seems EFF got scared and took down the material on this matter from there website. None of the article links to EFF work.
It was alleged that during one of the Gulf Wars, the US had modified printers sold to Iraq with some kind of location device allowing cruise missiles to find their target. I assume this was some kind of radio transmitter that identified what Iraqi government department had purchased the printer. I'm also guessing that the device probably cost a lot more than the printer. It has just recently been noted in the news that in the US pilotless drones will be allowed to fly presumably looking for bad guys. I think folks may have more to worry about than yellow dots on printer output. It's been known that military ordinance sometimes hits the wrong target, so beware.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I have two questions: 1) Does the printer do this by itself, or is it the driver? 2) My printer has no separate yellow tank for printing these dots, so is it the normal yellow ink that requires blue light to be visible? What if I use 3rd party ink (apart from voiding warranty)?
IBM and Lexmark usually just put their brand name on some other printer. The color ones were Ricoh printers for a while. IIRC, IBM spun off a chunk of their printing systems division with Ricoh a couple years ago. They're just down the road here.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The solution to this is trivial. If I'm a counterfeiter and I don't want to be traced, then I buy a printer with cash and throw it away after a short time. The manufacturers set the price of ink/toner refills so high, the counterfeiter would logically do this at the time the printer ran out. Oh, and the cost to the counterfeiter is 0 if they print the cash to buy successive printers. So long as they don't buy a printer twice from the same store and don't reveal their IDs at the time of purchase (say, for a "warranty"), I don't see how they're going to get caught. Have you noticed that the manufacturers are printing the serial number on the box these days, and that stores scan them at the time of purchase? I wonder why...
Okay to save you the trouble: I have a Canon printer, it's IP address is 192.168.1.68, and it's over there on my desk.
Neither is my Kodak. But that would explain why it has to have color ink when I never use color. It has no way to turn color printing off. I suspect the need to print yellow dots is the reason. Or is that my paranoia talking?
It is a real PITA to print management companies that the manufacturers do not provide the equivalent of a VIN. The serial number read by programs like PrintAudit is not necessarily the same as the brass tag, and HP are known to release evaluation printers with a serial of XXXXXX. We would actually prefer MORE traceability, not to catch dissidents but to reduce theft.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I took a lot of crap when I mentioned several years ago that some sort of GPS like circuits existed within printers and probably many computers as well. But this article confirms it. If a printer gives its location it must know its location. Sometimes as in the Iraq war certain printers simply existing was enough to get a smart bomb delivered suddenly. The reason was that some printers and computers are expensive and not normally purchased except by governments or powerful companies. Running a major company or any governmental office was enough to earn that smart bomb. That goes back to Desert Storm and is not a recent development. Obviously if you go to a store and pay cash for a printer the store nor the manufacturer does not have your address unless the device can get the information on its own. I predict that some operating systems and also some encryption software is government sponsored in such a way that they have a handy back door into everything done on a PC.
Kill the yellow channel on the color inks. If your printer uses separate black ink, just leave the color out. If all else fails, print a lot of pages of all-yellow on the same set of several sheets until the yellow ink runs out.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, not paranoia... It's the fact that printer ink is the most valuable liquid in the world.
http://boingboing.net/2009/12/30/graph-compares-price.html
More valuable than blood and definitely more valuable than crude oil, let alone gasoline.
People ask "what to the printer makers get for their complicity?" More ink and toner sales of course.
Yet some of their models were positive on the EFF tests.
There's a US law that forbids melting down pennies and nickels, or exporting them in large quantities.
(The penny was changed to copper-plated zinc in mid-1982; 95% copper pennies from before then are also worth above their face value in metal.)
USC Title 31 Section 5111 subsection D (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5111) gives the Secretary of the Treasury the option, http://www.usmint.gov/pressroom/?action=press_release&ID=724 is about that option being used.
PS
Many silver coins are just worth their metal value, and those are often melted down.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Lots of printers will refuse to print other colors (or even B&W) when the yellow cartridge is empty. Those who work in the printer servicing industry have my sympathies. Most customers probably think it's price gouging scheme.
.. it was the right house
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiyana_Stanley_Jones
not saying there weren't multiple fuckups on the parts of law enforcement,
(there most assuredly were from what I read)
but there is a small sliver of 'reap what ya sow' in all that went on there, father included.......
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
so buy your printers used. not a big deal. Preferably, buy them used from your political enemies, so anything bad traces back to *them*.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Since I'm not counterfeiting money, is this something that should be of concern to me? It sounds like there's some invisible info printed there. Say I printed something and then handed that to a nefarous person. Would they be able to look under a microscope and find easily decodable information that would allow them to steal my identity? Break into my house?
Do all of those companies actually manufacture their own printers? I thought Dell just re-branded other printers.
Thank you for the update. Such things generally never make the news as big as the initial few announcements.
But as you say, there is still plenty wrong with that raid including the shoot first ask later aspects, so my original point still stands.
Even reading the update, it still seems as fucked up as when initially reported.
They show the father provided the gun, but that no one knew or even suspected that at the time of the raid.
The cop that shot the 7 year old had also in the past threatened children with his weapon, including an infant, and shooting family dogs.
A&E still refuses to release the video evidence of the cover up to anyone.
But my point is that once you are so much as linked to a crime, they will come in guns blazing and figure out the details later.
The feds do take counterfeiting money pretty seriously, as in guns drawn seriously.
Even if this one example wasn't perfect (aka only 3 out of 5 innocent people in the home, instead of 4 out of 5), there are plenty of other examples that are.
If I sold off my printer or tossed it in a dumpster, I would prefer the feds think of that possibility first instead of simply linking the crime to documents I printed on it long in the past, and bust my door down with guns drawn...
They have too much money!
None of their printers tested produce the dots. Samsung and Oki are the names to look for.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's pretty much openly acknowledged, so it's a distraction.
IIRC all the printers we could influence had hidden RF noise generators that could be turned on remotely (software turns a relay into a spark gap generator?). Would only work in an environment like Iraq. Government had money/printers, pretty much nobody else did.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Back this sh@t up!
Created by EFF, but now a broken link (one of many) on their site,
please visit the following url and archive the information presented and copy/paste it around the net:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061017200758/https://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
If THAT link is broken, go here and find it by date:
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/https://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
I will quote it here but the page contains important images, please share this information before it's LOST forever!
DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide
This guide is part of the Machine Identification Code Technology project. It explains how to read the date, time, and printer serial number from forensic tracking codes in a Xerox DocuColor color laser printout. This information is the result of research by Robert Lee, Seth Schoen, Patrick Murphy, Joel Alwen, and Andrew "bunnie" Huang. We acknowledge the assistance of EFF supporters who have contributed sample printouts to give us material to study. We are still looking for help in this research; we are asking the public to submit test sheets or join the printers mailing list to participate in our reverse engineering efforts.
The DocuColor series prints a rectangular grid of 15 by 8 miniscule yellow dots on every color page. The same grid is printed repeatedly over the entire page, but the repetitions of the grid are offset slightly from one another so that each grid is separated from the others. The grid is printed parallel to the edges of the page, and the offset of the grid from the edges of the page seems to vary. These dots encode up to 14 7-bit bytes of tracking information, plus row and column parity for error correction. Typically, about four of these bytes were unused (depending on printer model), giving 10 bytes of useful data. Below, we explain how to extract serial number, date, and time from these dots. Following the explanation, we implement the decoding process in an interactive computer program.
Because of their limited contrast with the background, the forensic dots are not usually visible to the naked eye under white light. They can be made visible by magnification (using a magnifying glass or microscope), or by illuminating the page with blue instead of white light. Pure blue light causes the yellow dots to appear black. It can be helpful to use magnification together with illumination under blue light, although most individuals with good vision will be able to see the dots distinctly using either technique by itself.
This is an image of the dot grid produced by a Xerox DocuColor 12, magnified 10x and photographed by a Digital Blue QX5 computer microscope under white light. While yellow dots are visible, they are very hard to see. We will need to use a different technique in order to get a better view.
http://web.archive.org/web/20061017200758im_/https://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/faint2.jpg
This is an image of a portion of the dot grid under 60x magnification. Now the dots are easy to see, but their overall structure is hard to discern because the microscope field only includes a few dots at a time.
http://web.archive.org/web/20061017200758im_/https://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/60x.jpg
This is an image of one repetition of the dot grid from the same Xerox DocuColor 12 page, magnified 10x and photographed by the QX5 microscope under illumination from a Photon blue LED flashlight. Note that the increased contrast under blue light allows us to see the entire dot pattern clearly.
It's a shame Brother cooperated, they were initially hold-outs, but now I go out of my way to avoid them.
However, we've still got Samsung, and they're generally the best & cheapest options across the board, anyhow.
Everyone go out and by a CLP-325W now... (Only that specific model, otherwise you don't get PCL-5 support). It's only $150USD shipped, and the early bugs in the firmware have been worked-out.
http://3btech.net/sacl80wicola.html
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Easy enough to avoid government dots; just don't buy printers from Canon, Brother, Casio, HP, Konica, Minolta, Mita, Ricoh, Sharp, or Xerox." Hehehehe, you are being facetious by that right? Looks like I will have to stick with clay tablets. :(
Hey, they are forcing me to waste in/toner for something that i didn't approve of.
Sounds like a class action to me.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
are the dots always in the same locations? If so just take an empty document, print it out on the same pieces of paper through 4-5 different devices until its just a meaningless clusterfuck of yellow dots, then print your document. Even if they could somehow decode individual serial numbers it seems like that would give a decent defense... not that any government agency tracking these dots would give a flying fuck about your rights. The thing that annoys me about this is it seems to imply these printers were designed to print their serial numbers with a finer precision than the document printing capabilities you paid for!
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
The "location" isn't really identified since these devices have no way of knowing their location
They often have an IP address and that can usually be traced to an approximate location.
But not for the child. She just got killed by careless cops who didn't really care who they hurt. That's why one of them got convicted of manslaughter.
To be honest, once an incident like that happens, practically any NEW thing police say about anyone involved is suspect. After all, they dearly want to portray everyone harmed as a bad guy.
How about printers from those companies that are exported? I'd imagine that some countries with decent privacy laws might have something to say about this (like Germany, for example).
It's been at least 6 or 8 years now since I tossed the last one. Every time I bought a new cartridge for it I ended up printing maybe a page or three, and then discovering that the ink had all dried up on the next occasion I felt a need for hard-copy, usually 8 or 12 months later. I concluded that - given the ridiculous per-page cost of owning a printer - I'm better-off driving down to a local copy shop with the content on a flash stick any time I need to print stuff. My print costs now run to pennies a year, and any Yellow Dots that might or might not get printed on the page can get traced... all the way to Southcape Copies.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
Solution: catapult printers at the drones.
I have worked for Xerox since the early 80s, and on color products since they came out. From what I understand, Xerox would financially benefit from color products, but the technology could cause chaos with counterfeiting and the U.S. treasury department, which I believe it did anyway. Xerox, a public company, had to include anti-counterfeiting measures to comply with U.S. treasury regulations. The yellow dot pattern only shows the last six digits of a nine digit serial number of the machine that printed it. A binary grid is laid over the dot pattern to show the last six digits. The dot pattern is printed on every square inch of the paper, so you could print your own postage stamps and not get the whole grid on them. You can hard stop the machine while printing and see the dots on the imaging belt or photo drum after you remove from the machine. You can also program the machine to perform a color conversion and convert anything yellow on your original to black and get a copy with a bunch of black dots, that's providing the original is printed/copied from a color machine. You can't change the serial number! The serial number is stored on three different components of the machine. If those three don't sync, your machine don't work. So if you printed money and someone caught you, then all they could do is call xerox and ask what customer has the serial number with the last six digits of xxx-xxx. Even then the machine could have been resold several times and who tracks that? In 1992 we had a guy print $40,000 in 100s to buy cocaine. The dealer turned him in, not the dots.
Back when my grandfather bought his typewriter in 1960~70s he had to register it with the KGB. The idea is that the print drum is unique on each machine (like a finger print). So then if you started sending anonymous letters to somebody the KGB would be able to figure out who's typewriter was used to print the message and track you down.
And back in those days a typewriter was an equivalent of a modern day high end phone/computer: people would not just give it away to friends or throw it out.
Easy enough to avoid - just use mono printers for everything you don't want tracked. Problem solved.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You could take your [soon to be] inexpensive 3D printer, and program the robot arm to hold a pen, then 'write' out the text just like old plotter machines did. With a fine pen, small text and different fonts could be written. Advanced versions with multi-color pens could draw (or 'dot') images. (Or make/adapt your own head capable of spraying jets of ink.)
Though once you post to your /. journal about the awesome 2D plotter you built from your 3D makerbot, "they" will know the print came from you.
(I suppose you should also grind your own tree fibers or recycle your own paper. Someday each ream of paper may have a slightly notched edge used as a unique identifier.)