What You See Is Not What You Get October 20, 2005
Posted by Resident Egoist in : Politics , comments closedImagine paying a visit to your local real estate firm with the intended goal of buying a house, and all indeed, goes well. You get a great home, at a great price and with excellent customer service. Only, you do not get merely a house, you get — without your knowledge, of course — a house full of bugs (i.e., wires and tiny surveillance cameras that track and monitor everything you do inside).
Now suppose that one day you found out about this entire ordeal and contacted the real estate company, and in answer to why tracking and monitoring devices were embeded within your house without your knowledge and permission, you get the following: “spying devices were installed in your house without your knowledge and permission in order to allow the State to better fight and punish criminals.”
Now, I am sure that your real estate company does not install bugs on houses you purchase, but it is extremely probable that your printer’s manufacturer does.
Via the Press Room of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
San Francisco – A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.
The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.
“We’ve found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.
You can see the dots on color prints from machines made by Xerox, Canon, and other manufacturers. The dots are yellow, less than one millimeter in diameter, and are typically repeated over each page of a document. In order to see the pattern, you need a blue light, a magnifying glass, or a microscope.
EFF and its partners began its project to break the printer code with the Xerox DocuColor line. Researchers Schoen, EFF intern Robert Lee, and volunteers Patrick Murphy and Joel Alwen compared dots from test pages sent in by EFF supporters, noting similarities and differences in their arrangement, and then found a simple way to read the pattern.
“So far, we’ve only broken the code for Xerox DocuColor printers,” said Schoen. “But we believe that other models from other manufacturers include the same personally identifiable information in their tracking dots.”
[...]
Xerox previously admitted that it provided these tracking dots to the government, but indicated that only the Secret Service had the ability to read the code. The Secret Service maintains that it only uses the information for criminal counterfeit investigations. However, there are no laws to prevent the government from abusing this information.
Well, there you have it. What is going on here is in no essential way different from the scenario at the begining of this post. I am not a believer in the existence of an irreducible “right to privacy”, but I certainly am a firm advocte of inviolate property rights.
Xerox, or any other printer manufacturer, does have the right to embed any tracking/monitoring device they wish into their products, but that is not where property rights stop: consumers possess them, too — hence their right to be aware of the true and full nature of what they freely purchase. It is imperative that the Law ensures that what you ask for during an interpersonal exchange is indeed what you get, and not something else, let alone a malicious spying entity.
But what is going on here is outright fraud — and it is not only supported and sanctioned by the law, it is undertaken in the name of the Law and under the banner of Justice! Not to mention the fact that everytime you print a page, in the background, what is going on is an unauthorized use of your often-expensive-and-hard-to-find ink; i.e., theft — with the ultimate goal of promoting further and even more destructive theft: government-issued, wealth-destroying, paper money!
It is also important to know that this information may not be available only the U.S Secret Service, but possibly to every government on Earth. Hell, if companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Cisco — among others — have not refrained from making explicit deals with dictatorial government such as China to prohibit the use of such words as “democracy”, “liberty”, “freedom”, and “human rights”, what is there really to prevent others from making similar deals as the present one between the U.S government and the printing industry? Not to forget, of course, that nearly everything we consume is “Made In China”.
The folks at EFF are indeed right to note …
Underground democracy movements that produce political or religious pamphlets and flyers, like the Russian samizdat of the 1980s, will always need the anonymity of simple paper documents, but this technology makes it easier for governments to find dissenters … Even worse, it shows how the government and private industry make backroom deals to weaken our privacy by compromising everyday equipment like printers. The logical next question is: what other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?
Technorati Tags: Privacy, Leviathan, Corporate Fraud