Why printers add secret tracking dots
bbc.com
bbc.com
Obviously it's a useful feature for an employer; a little underhanded (it should be common knowledge, not a secret program) and understandable from a business perspective. Especially for an organization like the NSA.
But for a consumer product, it is completely unreasonable to at least not offer an option to disable the feature. The only other product that deliberately leaves identifying traces that I can think of is ammunition.
Did anyone at one of these printer companies express reluctance over the idea? Was anyone let go over it? Did anyone refuse to work on the project?
Is anyone reluctant to do this work? Hell, no; that stuff is really cool to work on.
And the moral dilemma is more limited than you might realize. Frankly, given enough time, a printer company could identify a printer from a printout without these dots, down to its manufacturing batch (you could confirm the specific printer if you had access to the printer itself) and date of printing (down to a couple days or weeks, depending on how long ago it was). The dots just make it automatic instead of painstaking.
That's significant though. Something that's painstaking only gets done if someone thinks there's a specific, targeted reason to do it. Something that's trivial and automatic gets used broadly without any individualized suspicion unless there are legal limits on doing so.
We don't have the sort of clear ethics rules in tech that doctors, lawyers and engineers have, but if we did I think one of them should be that tech should not intentionally work against the interests of its user or owner. That means introducing surveillance features into a printer without telling the buyer they're present is unethical. Using a tracking feature as a selling point, say, to allow an organization to identify the origin of a leaked document is another matter.
Just? You just described the difference between surveillance and automated mass surveillance. Economies of scale.
Roughly, the printer industry set up self-surveillance in the 90s, because they figured the alternative would be bans on their products. On the government side, European countries were pushing for it at least as hard as the US was.
Taggants are used in some commercially produced explosives.
Micro stamping is currently not enforced strictly but if it would it would be no more legal to swap the firing pin as it would be to put in a full auto fire control mechanism on a federa level, or on a state level flash hider or a normal capacity magazine in states that forbid them.
The stamps are required to be on the firearm, not the ammunition. They're supposed to leave an identifiable mark on the ammunition when fired.
In 2012, the Secret Service released a document in response to an FOIA request that listed the manufacturers that agreed to add these tracking dots at that time.[1]
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/technology/personaltech/24...
That said, I suspect this mis-feature is being forced on manufacturers now ostensibly for anti-counterfeiting, but in reality to enable tracking for other 3-letter agencies :(
We need our telecom back, our Internet, our printers, all of it. To hell with all the "but muh terrorism" excuses.
Is there any law that permits the USG to compel any action, other than those legal requests pursuant to an active investigation, on the part of private companies?
I remember watching a news report a few years ago where the journalist tried doing just that (with photocopied euro bills on regular paper without any clever trick) and he had a pretty high success rate.
That being said I can't really imagine anybody doing that at a big enough scale that somebody would bother tracing printer dots back to them. I don't think the authorities are going to bother with that if you slip a dozen fake 10 euro bills around Paris. I guess it can be dissuasive though, keeping honest people honest.
Plus the bills are printed using intaglio so yep, real currency has raised ink but that's hard to reproduce.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-09-10/news/os-bleac...
You would put the bill in a vending machine and once it read it and credited the transaction you could yank the bill out of the machine and make a selection, and you'd pic the cheapest thing in the machine and it would give you the goods and change.
The only machine in my town that this worked on was at the local post office on the stamp machine.
I had a shit-ton of stamps, and nobody to write to as a twelve year old hooligan. But I was able to buy a lot of ice cream and lame toys with the change stolen from that machine.
Sorry post office!
Sorry vending machine owner!
Just show someone some Canadian money and you'll most likely get snickers and "Monopoly money" comments.
That being said US currency does have a number of security features - maybe other countries are overdoing it?
You can print on plastic but I'd say it's not the same as trying to make a paper note using a printer.
The paper was the hard part actually...inkjets certainly will print high quality counterfeits.
Plus you can't duplicate the micro printing, the security thread or the color changing ink.
I guess for 5's maybe but 20's? Everyone should take a quick look at those.
Yes I passed them at fast-food places and, to be honest, for drug deals, which perhaps doesn't count as much to some, but I do remember a McDonalds where the drive-thru person said "sorry we can't take this" and I just feigned surprise and handed them a real note.
Also, I used a linen paper from office depot that gave the notes a decent feel.
yes you can.
If I turn my head and squint, it looks roughly like "Government oversight / voluntary manufacturer action to minimize cost due to tragedy of the commons"---the technology makes some forms of crime much cheaper, the government worked with manufacturers (probably with some off-the-books arm-twisting) to alter the technology to minimize its efficacy for a subset of those forms of crime.
And you know that because...?
Just because you didn't know about it doesn't mean that the General Services Administration and large corporate IT departments weren't quietly asking for it.
Edit:
> Finish your sentence, please :)
OK: Because 'your' printer, and its manufacturer, [and the NSA/Erdogan/multinational corp.] are hostile to you [printing illegal protest posters/exposing corporate crimes/spreading dissent/whistleblowing].
And yes, preventing individuals from breaking the law is hostile to those individuals, even if all laws were just. And they are not.
We have a legal principle in most countries that you can't be forced to testify against yourself or against family, or that the court can't use illegally obtained evidence. If we were just interested in solving crimes above all, we wouldn't have those restrictions. Why don't we e.g. make the punishment for not confessing or denunciating equal to the punishment for the crime itself?
In the same vein, I think there should be a restriction in place in principle. Your stuff cannot be made to work against you.
The police should not be able to remotely stop your car via software. And more importantly, if you have any implants like a pacemaker, the police should not be able to use that to incapacitate you. It's entirely concievable that at some point there will be a hostage situation where the criminal has an implant, and somebody will come up with that plan.
More general, as "stuff" is becoming more and more intelligent, we should be able to trust our stuff. I think it is a fundamental value in the modern "information society" or "IOT world" or "industry 4.0" or what you might call it.
The idea seems crazy at first, but the more I think about it, it is right up there with free speech, or the idea that my wife can't be forced to testify against me. (Or, controversially, the right to bear arms - and I say that as a liberal who is for strict gun control! - but I think the sentiment is related. When the government goes out of control, some people want to rely on their guns - I think that is not realistic, and harmful for society - but I just want to be able to rely on my laptop, to be able to write subversive content without it ratting me out!)
Finish your sentence, please :)
That was the original purpose of the tracking dots. I don't think it's at all surprising that an intelligence agency would co-opt a law enforcement identification mechanism.
There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law.
1) It prevents nothing. It is about post-facto detection.
2) It is self-evidently hostile to the law-breaker.
3) Whether or not it is moral to break the law is the relevant question, and that depends on the law. The "original purpose" of this tech hardly matters. Ask the authors of Soviet-era samizdat.
It all depends on how they do it. There are plenty of hostile things that are done in the name of law enforcement.
The Stasi took fingerprints of every typewritter so people couldn't publish illegal things. This is not hostile only if the state is defined as non hostile.
Shall we all be clockwork oranges, then? The only ones allowed to have free will shall be the ones that programmed us to vote them into the legislature every time?
My Dad had a complete melt down one day about not being able to print in B&W. When I told him about the yellow fingerprinting, he thought I was joking. Nope!
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
There is code At the chip level that is unknown to the what it actually does provided by the government. Thought to be currency detection, but maybe adding these dots too?
It was quite a head scratchier, we actually thought there's something wrong with our printer until I googled about these yellow dots.
It would be interesting to combine the two techniques!
Microprinting is for preventing forgery and thus is incredibly difficult to copy but techniques to copy are always improving. I assume microdots are not as difficult to copy and are about tracking.
So if someone effectively copied the microprint you could inject microdots and those would be copied as well. Thus you might be able to track the forger as well detect forgery statistical analysis (based on the fact microdots encode changing data such as time).
I know of a line of printers that you can netcat firmware into. That's just terrifying.
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/20/outlaw_printer_dots/ [2] https://viewfromll2.com/2009/11/16/big-brothers-invisible-ye...