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.

Comments

lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would want to counterfeit american money? If you're gonna stick your neck out at least counterfeit something of value

Re:lol

[element-o.p.]

I haven't seen any actual reports on inflation, but I have been paying attention to prices, and I'd say it's definitely happening. Just a few examples, off the top of my head: I got my pilot's license in 1991 -- the same Cessna 152 I learned to fly in at $36 per hour now costs $120 per hour to rent; around that same time, I used to fill up my car for ~$1/gallon but it's $3.50 per gallon now; I'm into archery, and the arrows I used to buy for $4 each now cost more like $10 each; and houses in my city have gone from ~$150K to ~$300K. That's 200-300% inflation in 20 years. I know, I know, "anecdote, data, etc." but just about the only thing I can think of where prices have decreased is technology -- computers, hard drives, network gear, cell phones, etc.

Re:lol

[Grishnakh]

That "dirt cheap" food is much shittier than it was 20+ years ago. On top of that, portion sizes have shrunk: take a look at various canned foods, and compare them with cans from 20 years ago; the volumes have shrunk slightly to offset the inflation.

Clothing is only cheaper because they've moved all the production to southeast Asia, and of course tech products are cheaper for two reasons: 1) they're all made in China now, and 2) newer technological processes are cheaper and more efficient than the old ones. Also 3) volumes are likely higher for many tech items, and greater volumes means greater economies of scale; not as many people had PCs or laptop 20 years ago.

With furniture, you have to be careful because there's a lot of shitty cardboard furniture out there (no shit, it's just paper fibers pressed together with a fake wood-grain laminate glued on top); for a valid comparison, you need to look at the prices of solid wood high-quality furniture (something like Thomasville), from both then and now. Even that's a little suspect because on a lot of the factory furniture, they're using more veneers on even the hardwood furniture: instead of solid cherry, they make it out of a cheap hardwood like birch and use cherry veneers. Still far better than cardboard shit, but it's not the same as non-veneered furniture as veneers can come off, plus if you ever want to refinish the piece, there's only so much you can do with a veneer, whereas with solid wood you can sand through even deep scratches and refinish without damaging it.

Bottom line: be very careful in how you make comparisons in the prices of items.

What's the problem?

[YttriumOxide]

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)

Re:What's the problem?

[chichilalescu]

you know, my aunt had a typing machine. in Romania, before the fall of communism. and everybody remembers that, in those days, you had to give the "fingerprint" of any typing machine to the authorities.
as you might know, there are these tiny problems with each letter, and they can be traced back to the machine. so, in practice, the authorities could find out if a paper had been typed by your machine or not.
in my experience, if you want a warranty for your printer, the store will need the serial number of your device. and if you pay with a credit card, they can link your contact information to the device. and if you try to google the way to change the serial number, you probably end up an watchlist of some sort.
personally, I don't know if it's a good situation when it's impossible to be anonymous. but I am certain they should tell you about it when it does happen.
your argument is that it doesn't affect normal users, and that you don't actively keep it a secret. well, you do keep it a secret, because a FOIA request had to be made to find it out. and it doesn't matter if it affects normal users or not, as long as they don't know.

Re:What's the problem?

[Megane]

As a further note, right now there's no way to trace that serial number to me.

They can identify that two pages both came from the same printer. Which includes sneaking into your house when you're not around and printing a test page. Or not sneaking in, if they already suspect you enough.

Re:What's the problem?

[gaspyy]

Yes, parent is correct. We were required by law to register any typewriter with the police. Failure to comply was a major offense, with prison time and if you were flagged as threat to the system you could end up in a forced labor camp (e.g. the infamous "Danube-Black Sea Canal"). Nasty memories and it's incredible how people don't learn from history.

Re:What's the problem?

[PopeRatzo]

Me: Hello, Yttrium Oxide* speaking (not my real name)

So you're not related to the Connecticut Oxides? When I was in college, I dated Strontium. I've had a nasty rash ever since.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is government cooperation, this automatically raises a flag - this company will not have a problem cooperating with the government.

You make it sound like they had a choice.

"Nice company you got here. Be a shame if we had to audit your records for the past twenty years. You're not on the terrorists' side, are you?"

Re:What's the problem?

[drussell]

Problem 4: Printing these dots consumes my ink.

Yes, and it uses a LOT of it! Older HP color lasers would print a B&W page without using the color toner cartridges at all, no wasted toner on a B&W page... Many of the newer ones I've seen always use a color pass for B&W, making color toner cartridges run out quite quickly when printing B&W even though it shouldn't even have to pull color toner onto the drum. And yes, the yellow always runs out first (even though it's only used a little bit more than the base "waste toner" that is used on each pass of a cartridge). (I have a couple LaserJet 2840s and this is VERY obvious; we get about 10% of rated color toner cart life due to high B&W use).

I'm sure HP loves it, it's another way to sell even more quantity of their overpriced inks and toners. This "feature" costs us about $500/year per printer in extra toner use! (About an extra cyan and magenta each year -- yellow about every 9 mo.)

I can even see the pattern naked-eye, at least on the 96 bright paper we use... It's always been VERY annoying. Otherwise, fairly nice printers, but they eat supplies and I've known exactly why since day 1.

Yay! I have a Lexmark!

[erroneus]

Great to know my printer maker isn't on the list.

Re:Yay! I have a Lexmark!

[datapharmer]

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?

Re:So this is why my ink runs out so fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or more exaclty why my printer refuse to print black and white pages because the yellow cartridge is empty.

Certainly not microscopic

[kccricket]

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.

Re:Certainly not microscopic

[chrb]

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/ has some magnified images. At 10x zoom I would guess the diameter is about 1mm, so maybe 0.1mm for the original dots...

Re:um...

[zill]

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.