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Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color
Printers
By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
10/19/05 "Washington
Post" -- -- It sounds like a conspiracy
theory, but it isn't. The pages coming out of your color printer
may contain hidden information that could be used to track you
down if you ever cross the U.S. government.
Last year, an article in PC World magazine pointed out that
printouts from many color laser printers contained yellow dots
scattered across the page, viewable only with a special kind of
flashlight. The article quoted a senior researcher at Xerox
Corp. as saying the dots contain information useful to
law-enforcement authorities, a secret digital "license tag" for
tracking down criminals.
The content of the coded information was supposed to be a
secret, available only to agencies looking for counterfeiters
who use color printers.
Now, the secret is out.
Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco
consumer privacy group, said it had cracked the code used in a
widely used line of Xerox printers, an invisible bar code of
sorts that contains the serial number of the printer as well as
the date and time a document was printed.
With the Xerox printers, the information appears as a pattern of
yellow dots, each only a millimeter wide and visible only with a
magnifying glass and a blue light.
The EFF said it has identified similar coding on pages printed
from nearly every major printer manufacturer, including
Hewlett-Packard Co., though its team has so far cracked the
codes for only one type of Xerox printer.
The U.S. Secret Service acknowledged yesterday that the
markings, which are not visible to the human eye, are there, but
it played down the use for invading privacy.
"It's strictly a countermeasure to prevent illegal activity
specific to counterfeiting," agency spokesman Eric Zahren said.
"It's to protect our currency and to protect people's
hard-earned money."
It's unclear whether the yellow-dot codes have ever been used to
make an arrest. And no one would say how long the codes have
been in use. But Seth Schoen, the EFF technologist who led the
organization's research, said he had seen the coding on
documents produced by printers that were at least 10 years old.
"It seems like someone in the government has managed to have a
lot of influence in printing technology," he said.
Xerox spokesman Bill McKee confirmed the existence of the hidden
codes, but he said the company was simply assisting an agency
that asked for help. McKee said the program was part of a
cooperation with government agencies, competing manufacturers
and a "consortium of banks," but would not provide further
details. HP said in a statement that it is involved in
anti-counterfeiting measures and supports the cooperation
between the printer industry and those who are working to reduce
counterfeiting.
Schoen said that the existence of the encoded information could
be a threat to people who live in repressive governments or
those who have a legitimate need for privacy. It reminds him, he
said, of a program the Soviet Union once had in place to record
sample typewriter printouts in hopes of tracking the origins of
underground, self-published literature.
"It's disturbing that something on this scale, with so many
privacy implications, happened with such a tiny amount of
publicity," Schoen said.
And it's not as if the information is encrypted in a highly
secure fashion, Schoen said. The EFF spent months collecting
samples from printers around the world and then handed them off
to an intern, who came back with the results in about a week.
"We were able to break this code very rapidly," Schoen said.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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