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."

"Evil" Printers?

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

(I got it first!!!)

Re:"Evil" 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.

Re:"Evil" Printers?

Except the Evil is subjective and Steal has a definite meaning.

Yes, Evil.

> 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.

The EFF is concerned about this technology because they've read their history books. And because some people who participated in writing the history books... had to be very careful about what they printed those books on. And because the systems of government used in the Warsaw Pact countries from 1917-1991 was - to many people, myself included - "evil".

I posted this a few months ago, the last time the topic came up. This is not just about counterfeiting. (And as a guy who likes money, I hate counterfeiters with a passion almost equalled to my hatred of spammers, which is pretty freakin' intense.)

In Soviet Romania [google.com] [google.com], a sample page from every typewriter had to be registered with the police, so that any samizdat produced could be quickly traced back to the typewriter's owner. Use your imagination as to what happened to the owner, or Google for it.

In Romania every typewriter had to be registered with a local magistrate. Samples of letters typed on these machines had to be produced under the observation of the secret police so they could trace underground publishing activity.

- G. Davey, Christian Publishing: Before and After the Communist Collapse

In Soviet Russia [geocities.com] [geocities.com], all photocopiers were registered with the KGB and kept in secure rooms, to which physical access was restricted.

Some samizdat works, mostly magazines, were typed on typewriter. The copies were indistinct and hard to read. I realized that the movement against violating human rights was doomed to be an eternal amusement of the few intellectuals without proper copyprinters. But where could one find a copyprinting machine in the country, where all the copiers were affixed with seals at night and placed in the special rooms where only proved KGB members could work on it. There was the only decision - to make the machine ourselves. It had to be easy to make and quite efficient.

- A. A. Bolonkin, Memoirs of Soviet Political Prisoner

The West is probably still playing catch-up.

I understand now!

This explains all of the random pin-misfires I'm having on my dot-matrix printer! Thank God that it's just my government protecting me from terrorists^H^H^H counterfeiters.

Finding Evil Printers

Finding Evil Printers should be easy. Just test for the Evil Bit.

Dead giveaways

The print heads rotate 360 degrees while ejecting green ink at great force and saying, "your mother svcks cocks in hell".

Getting the word out

EFF deserves a bit of respect for this. They're trying to let everyone else know what companies are doing behind their little white walls to lock you down. Personally, I'm going to make a donation right now to EFF. They need some big-time exposure to change the normal cow-like brainless mob of AOL users into intelligent thinkers.

Do an exchange...

If you think you've done something illegal or just don't want to be tracked, I'll take the fall for you.

Send your current model color laser printer to me. I'll even send you a 7 year old inkjet that I currently use as a footrest.

Stupid question but...

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?

Re:Stupid question but...

Say the cashier remembers you because she thought you were cute. ... or scary. ... or nervous.

Say there are CCTV tapes that still exist; each is checked for the POS timestamp. Each face is added to a 'question' list. You get a knock on your door when someone recognizes you or from your drivers license photo.

Say you left fingerprints on the paper you used to print the bogus green backs.

Say you go to stock up on Green Dye number 5 and trigger an alert clerk to write down your license plate, since the Feds had already passed out flyers stating to be on the lookout for individuals purchasing large quantities of this ink as it was used to finance terrorism (we all want to help, right?). Never mind the cash reward.

Say you buy more quality linen paper reams and someone notes the sale within 200 miles of your OD.

Say they just get damn lucky and lookup your slashdot ID.

There are hundreds of ways to screw up when you've broke the law. They just need one break. You need a perfect record of not making one.

I Wonder

You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printed there that could be used to trace the document back to you...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.

And here I was thinking all along that it was just a crappy printer that messed up every inch or so.

Maybe I could add a few more of mine in Photoshop just to make things more interesting.

Better that than suggesting that Xerox (and Canon and HP) should be shot for caving into foreign governments who use this to suppress free speech, all the while not telling us that they're doing it.

Evil Printers...

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.

Ask Publius about this

From the article: "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."

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?

anonymous coward

Nice to see the anonymous coward option existed way back then too!

I wonder if they used their karma bonus though?

Personally I'm guessing they did it so the British or anyone else didn't mod them '-1 DEAD!'

Defeats the presumed anonymity..

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.

Missing the point...

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?

Re:Do as I say, not as I do

I wonder if the government will be using these printers themselves, they have more to hide than anyone else.

Which is exactly why it should be REQUIRED for all government offices, and optional for citizens. Remember, "Where the people fear their government, there is tyranny, where the government fears its people, there is Liberty." - T. Jefferson (? sorry, quote's off the top of my head)

Re:Do as I say, not as I do

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.

There was an interview on NPR a few weeks ago with Michael Smith, the British journalist who uncovered the "Downing Street Memo." He said that governments already do this: when a classified document is distributed, they often introduce subtle changes in wording from one copy to the next, so that each person receives a very slightly different copy. That way, in theory if the document is leaked, they can figure out who leaked it.

Re:Tinfoil printouts

Our xerox does this... I just followed the instructions in TFA:

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.

I work for a manufacturer

I work for a large printer/copier manufacturer in the technical services area (IT related) and can confirm we've been doing this for MANY years in our colour products.

We refer to the technology as "micro dots". Each dot can uniquely identify the device by it's serial number (which is not only printed on a label but also hardcoded in to the machine).

I also happen to live in Australia, where it'd be a cold day in hell before we told anyone who didn't have a court order the serial number of a printer that produced a page or who we sold it to.

The dots are MUCH smaller than 1mm as suggested here, however I can confirm that yellow toner is used. If you have a good magnifying glass (at least 8 times) and a sharp eye you can spot them, but it's really not easy.

Additionally, our machines all have anti-counterfeit technology anyway. If you try to print or copy a banknote from any major world currency, all you'll get is a black square and possibly an error code being displayed on the panel.

In the entire time I've worked for this company, we've never once had to do a micro dot check for the police/government/whatever - I'd know because there's only about 3 or 4 of us in the company that have the knowhow to do it and they all work in my department. (no, the govt doesn't know how to do it themselves and even if they did, they'd still need to ask us where that serial number is now).

I've deliberately avoided mentioning my employers name in this post. I'm pretty sure I haven't broken any confidentiality agreements with this post (all I'm doing is confirming, not supplying new info) but you can't be too careful. Suffice to say, I don't think it matters which major manufacturer, I'd bet my bottom dollar we all do it.

Re:This might help out my business...

It reminds me of the old joke (or was it true?):

Some amateur counterfeiter was driving around the Appalachians to find some hillbillies to swindle. He found a couple of dumb-looking guys sitting on their front porch, stopped the car and said, waving a freshly printed note: "any of you guys have change for a $18 bill?". One of the guys reach in his pocket and says: "sure, d'ya want 2 nines or 3 sixes?"

Like, say, printing flyers for a protest?

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.

Re:Snakeoil?

If it's behind the laser window, you're screwed. Optics are touchy to a level that can only be described as premenstrual.

If you print a single line of text in notepad...

It's prints "Page 1" at the bottom, dumb ass.