– I was pretty amazed to read this though, apparently, it’s been around for awhile. Some color laser printers lay down a fine pattern of yellow dots on their printed pages which the Secret Service can use to back track to the specific printer that printed the document. It’s apparently a way to track-back to the folks who would use the printers to make counterfeit money, for example. And, in the most perfect of worlds, where the authorities aways acted only in the public good, that would be fine.
– But this is the country where J. Edgar Hoover bent the government to his will through several presidencies. It is the country where a professional agent’s career in the current administration was ruined because the administration didn’t like the fact that her husband reported the truth about the absence of WMD in Iraq. And it is the country wherein “Scooter” Libby, fully and fairly convicted of crimes connected with the agent’s unmasking – had his sentence commuted by the president. This list could go on for a long long time. But those were just the few things that came to mind this second. But, do I think all the government’s decisions are always and solely for the best good of the American public??? Naw, I don’t. So read this story and see how it makes you feel. Laser printers today, cell phones yesterday, door knobs tomorrow?
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MIT Media Labs launches SeeingYellow.com to call for protest against printer manufacturers whose laser printers secretly monitor usage
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other privacy advocates have long warned that some color laser printers produce a nearly invisible grid of yellow dots on documents that store the serial number of the printer and the date stamp of the printed page. Now Benjamin Mako Hill and other members of MIT Media Labs’ Computing Culture research group have established seeingyellow.com to spotlight this practice as an incursion on the civil liberties of the users of the laser printers. The yellow-dot “watermark” allows the US Secret Service to enlist the help of the manufacturers in tracking counterfeit currency generated on laser printers. A statement on seeing yellow.com calls this practice a “direct attack on the privacy of the owners and users of printers, and in particular, on their right to free, anonymous speech.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation previously reported on this issue and has posted a DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding guide that explains how the Xeroc DocuColor model printers produce the yellow dot pattern. It also provides a utility for translating your particular dot pattern to determine what information it stores. The DocuColor pattern is a repeating 15 x 8 grid of yellow dots on the entire page that encodes up to fourteen 7-bit bytes of data, such as model number, serial number, and date of printing. Other manufactures such as Brother, Hewlett Packard and so on also produce similar tracking patterns.
On his blog Mako points out that “The Federalist Papers were one of the most important set of documents in early US political history and they have fundementally shaped the way the US and its governments grew. They were (originally) published anonymously and there’s reason to believe that they would have said what they did or even been published at all if were immediately traceable to their authors.”
Alexander Hamilton co-authored the Federalist Papers, before being blackmailed by James Reynolds for having an affair with his wife, Maria Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds was later arrested for counterfeiting.
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