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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

I would love to know how many engineers, managers, and execs at printer companies were/are complicit in this.

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?

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I've worked at one of the printer companies in the article. Someone in my weekly meetings merely gave the weekly report "I worked on project XXXX" for a year. I'm not censoring him: he censored himself and just stopped giving details about his project, including the name of the project. I suspect he was working on currency constellation detection, not these tracking dots, but that's roughly how it plays out.

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.

> 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.

> The dots just make it automatic instead of painstaking.

Just? You just described the difference between surveillance and automated mass surveillance. Economies of scale.

It took me several re-reads of your comment to realize that your colleague literally wrote “I worked on project XXXX”, with actual X’es.

Maybe he didn't self censor, maybe it was just the printer.

I said this elsewhere[1], but its not immediately obvious that you can identify printers via machine learning. Classification gets really difficult when you have millions or billions of classes. Accuracy tends to fall off a cliff.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508048

Last year I wrote this summary of how it happened: http://ohuiginn.net/wp/?p=2175

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.

Thanks for sharing. I'd read from your research that concerns about counterfeiting were the primary motivation

> The only other product that deliberately leaves identifying traces that I can think of is ammunition.

Taggants are used in some commercially produced explosives.

And in Taser dart cartridges.

The imaging engine chips (soc with arm processors) for printers aren't made by the printer companies, but bought from third parties. From what I understand I don't think they're going to allow this feature to be turned off.

How does ammunition deliberately leave an identifying trace?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microstamping

Despite CA's idiosyncratic firearms laws, microstamping effectively does not exist in the real world (as in, no firearms on the market employ it, though the technology does exist).

Firing pins are pretty easy to swap out, though. Easy enough that this could be used to tamper with evidence or even frame someone. It doesn't really seem like a great idea.

Anything in a gun is easy to swap, but also illegal if it violates the law.

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.

I'm guessing they are talking about barrel rifling and firing pin/ejector marks that are used in matching weapons to crimes. I guess the could add some serial number during firing, but I've not heard of this as something in civilian weapons.

Generally speaking, it doesn't.

I know that firing pins usually leave a fairly unique trace.

Others mentioned microstamping but that's not the only method. Increasingly, ammunition being sold has serial numbers on both the bullet and the case.

I have never heard of serial numbers on bullets, and a google search led only to proposed state-level legislation to require them, which has not passed.

As far as I'm aware, no handguns currently being sold in the US employ microstamping. Also, I've never heard of serialized ammunition being sold in the US. Do you have sources on either of these currently being on the market?

I was not aware that any ammunition in the US is microstamped.

California has a law requiring the use of microstamping on semi-automatic handguns, however, models previously certified for sale in the state are exempt. I do not believe any manufacturer is actually offering a microstamped firearm for sale.

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.

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