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EFF Cracks Secret Printer CodeBy Pedro HernandezOctober 19, 2005
Some printers are divulging more information than their owners have bargained for. Case in point: the Xerox DocuColor color laser printer. As part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Machine Identification Code Technology project, the organization published its results after soliciting printouts from the public. Even on seemingly blank page, the printer is embedding the sheets with a code that can potentially be used to track documents to its original owner. The EFF's DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide gives details on how a pattern of tiny yellow dots, reveals the time and date of the printout as well as the serial number of the device used to produce the document. The 15 by 8 grid is reproduced several times within a printout but is difficult to see with the naked eye. However, with the aid of a blue lamp and under magnification the dots are easy to discern. As the quality of documents produced from home and business printers has improved, vendors have cooperated with the Secret Service to thwart counterfeiters. However, this has given rise to privacy concerns over non-currency documents. The EFF website explains: Yet there are no laws to stop the Secret Service from using printer codes to secretly trace the origin of non-currency documents; only the privacy policy of your printer manufacturer currently protects you (if indeed such a policy exists). And no law regulates what sort of documents the Secret Service or any other domestic or foreign government agency is permitted to request for identification, not to mention how such a forensics tool could be developed and implemented in printers in the first place. The organization also published a list of printers from various manufacturers that prints patterns of yellow dots, but warns that "'no' simply means that we couldn't see yellow dots; it does not prove that there is no forensic watermarking present."
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