THE OEM’S & OUR GOV. ARE SPYING ON YOU !

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Date: Saturday August 13, 2005 07:27:00 am
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    Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track
    Documents

     
    Practice embeds hidden, traceable data in every page
    printed.


    WASHINGTON–Next time you make a printout from your color laser
    printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a
    magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots
    printed there that could be used to trace the document back to
    you.


     According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the
    serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color
    copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the
    United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.


    Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company’s laser
    printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro
    series, put the “serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots” in
    every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page,
    nestled within the printed words and margins.


    “It’s a trail back to you,
    like a license plate,” Crean says.


    The dots’ minuscule size, covering less
    than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on
    white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine
    if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED
    light–say, from a keychain laser flashlight–on your page and use a
    magnifier.


    Crime Fighting vs. Privacy


    Laser-printing technology makes it
    incredibly easy to counterfeit money and documents, and Crean says the dots, in
    use in some printers for decades, allow law enforcement to identify and track
    down counterfeiters.


    However, they could also be employed to track a document
    back to any person or business that printed it. Although the technology has
    existed for a long time, printer companies have not been required to notify
    customers of the feature.


    Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeiting specialist with
    the U.S. Secret Service, stresses that the government uses the embedded serial
    numbers only when alerted to a forgery. “The only time any information is gained
    from these documents is purely in [the case of] a criminal act,” she
    says.


    John Morris, a lawyer for The Center for Democracy and Technology ,
    says, “That type of assurance doesn’t really assure me at all, unless there’s
    some type of statute.” He adds, “At a bare minimum, there needs to be a notice
    to consumers.”


    If the practice disturbs you, don’t bother trying to disable
    the encoding mechanism–you’ll probably just break your printer.


    Crean
    describes the device as a chip located “way in the machine, right near the
    laser” that embeds the dots when the document “is about 20 billionths of a
    second” from printing.


    “Standard mischief won’t get you around it,” Crean
    adds.


    Neither Crean nor Pagano has an estimate of how many laser printers,
    copiers, and multifunction devices track documents, but they say that the
    practice is commonplace among major printer companies.


    “The industry
    absolutely has been extraordinarily helpful [to law enforcement],” Pagano says.


    According to Pagano, counterfeiting cases are brought to the Secret Service,
    which checks the documents, determines the brand and serial number of the
    printer, and contacts the company. Some, like Xerox, have a customer database,
    and they share the information with the government.


    Crean says Xerox and the
    government have a good relationship. “The U.S. government had been on board all
    along–they would actually come out to our labs,” Crean says.


    History


    Unlike ink jet printers, laser printers, fax machines, and
    copiers fire a laser through a mirror and series of lenses to embed the document
    or image on a page. Such devices range from a little over $100 to more than
    $1000, and are designed for both home and office.


    Crean says Xerox pioneered
    this technology about 20 years ago, to assuage fears that their color copiers
    could easily be used to counterfeit bills.


    “We developed the first (encoding
    mechanism) in house because several countries had expressed concern about
    allowing us to sell the printers in their country,” Crean says.


    Since then,
    he says, many other companies have adopted the practice.


    The United States is
    not the only country teaming with private industry to fight counterfeiters. A
    recent article points to the Dutch government as using similar
    anticounterfeiting methods, and cites Canon as a company with encoding
    technology. Canon USA declined to comment
    .
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