Most laser printer printed pages have tracking watermark
brahmsyellowdots.blogspot.com
brahmsyellowdots.blogspot.com
http://www.eff.org/issues/printers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography
It's probably related to the counter-measures against printing currency:
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/photoshop-and-curr...
There's some interesting information about what causes an image to be detected as currency here:
I'm not talking paranoid - the government are spying on me - public, but what about doctors, lawyers, pharmacy, social services, employment tribunals, unions.
There is a lot of confidential information I can track about you by simply pulling plank bits of paper or envelopes from your garbage.
Personally I think the most worrying bits of data are first the time stamp, and second the printer serial number.
I say serial number is second because in a criminal investigation phorensics can also get a "fingerprint" of the printer by tracking imperfections in the way it's printed.
But the timestamp of when something was printed is definitely new information that otherwise would not be there and in certain circumstances would not want to be leaked.
In particular, not only leaked to police, but in the case of printers where the dot pattern's been decoded, to anyone who might care when your document was printed.
No argument there. I just thought I'd share a lot of what's already known so that we don't have to rediscover it.
Personally, as a law-abiding citizen, I'm really not too concerned about being the target of a police investigation, and if I ever am the target of a police investigation I'll be happy to hand over as much evidence as possible since it will assist the police in ascertaining the truth that I am not, in fact, the guilty party.
(Edit: The question's phrasing is for effect; I'm well aware there are egregious abuses documented in number greater than one. But I'm still not convinced that with the non-uniformity of the LEO population between different jurisdictions, etc, as well as the non-random selection bias, that all the accounts we have of LEO malevolence provide statistical certainty that police, overall, are bad.)
No, I don't. It only takes one less-than-perfectly-honest cop or prosecutor to totally destroy your life. Just ask Troy Davis. (Oh, wait, you can't. He's dead. He was recently executed for a crime he (almost certainly) did not commit.)
Being convicted of a crime you didn't commit may be a risk you're willing to take, but your snide remarks are not justified merely by the fact that others choose not to share your risk posture.
I don't know why some people vastly overweight certain low probabilities.
Second, it is far from clear that your chances of wrongful conviction in the U.S. are smaller than being struck by lightning. The Innocence Project has exonerated 280 people. That's 5-10 years worth of lightning deaths in the U.S., and those are just the ones that they have been able to prove were innocent using DNA testing and limited resources. The actual number of wrongly convicted people behind bars is surely much higher, but reliable numbers are understandably hard to come by.
And third, the U.S. has a lamentable track record of using criminal prosecution to silence various forms of dissent. c.f. Bradley Manning, Aaron Swartz, and all the people being arrested and pepper sprayed at the OWS protests.
All of these things can factor into one's personal decisions on how to interact with law enforcement. A certain level of skepticism about the integrity of the legal system is (alas) a defensible position.
BTW, your claimed math literacy is not much in evidence here. Of course opinions have no "statistical weight" (whatever that could possibly mean). Only data has statistical significance. So let's examine the data. So far in this discussion I've offered up three data points:
1. A video (hosted on YouTube, though I fail to see how that could possibly be relevant) of two individuals, one of whom claims to be a lawyer and another who claims to be a former police officer, both of whom say that it is unwise to talk to the police under any circumstances, and explain why in considerable detail.
2. The well-documented fact that the Innocence Project has to date exonerated 280 people.
3. The fact that Troy Davis was recently executed for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.
Are these data points statistically significant? I have no idea. I haven't done the math. But 1) neither have you and 2) the burden of proof is not on me. I am only arguing that it is not unreasonable to be wary of law enforcement. If someone wants to dispute that, the burden is on them to show that law enforcement is trustworthy. So far no one participating in this discussion has offered up EVEN A SINGLE DATA POINT in support of that position. So my three data points may or may not be statistically significant, but (and here comes a fine example of a snide comment) I dare say they have better prospects than your zero data points.
> Are these data points statistically significant? I have no idea. I haven't done the math. But 1) neither have you and 2) the burden of proof is not on me.
Forgive me for not showing my work. Contrary to your claims that I offered zero data points, I did mention that there are over three quarters of a million law enforcement officers in the US. That would require a randomly selected sample in the several hundreds to determine with any degree of accuracy the character of the population.
You will likely counter that you're not arguing about the character of the population, in fact, you just wrote:
> I am only arguing that it is not unreasonable to be wary of law enforcement.
I must assume you're retracting your earlier statements, then. The ones that started with, "You assume that the police care if you are guilty or not. They don't." and continue on for several more sentences that speak to the character of the population as a whole, notably including an alleged desire to convict anyone regardless of guilt and strongarm confessions.
My point with the above is that if that were an informed opinion based upon data the holder would need to see a sampling of several hundred randomly selected officer/citizen interactions and see the majority of them end in a disregard for the rule of law, courtesy, etc. To my knowledge, that doesn't exist. Partially for difficulties I mentioned originally: nonuniformity of the population, selection bias in accounts, etc.
I shall perform an additional back of the envelope calculation. The Uniform Crime Report for 2010 shows over 13 million arrests that year. Even considering the total number of arrests appears to be declining year over year lately, I can assume relatively safely that in recent years (8-15 roughly) there have been over 100 million arrests. That is a large number of interactions between police and the citizenry.
While I don't have a number for convictions, I will assume it is also rather large. Wikipedia lists over 7 million people under correctional supervision, so that's at least a floor. Do I claim that the false conviction rate is 280/7 million? No, but still (and especially considering that 7 million is likely to be an exceptionally low estimate) my intuition tells me that a random sampling of convictions would find the vast majority to be not wrongfully convicted through law enforcement malevolence.
Your fear and anger toward the general population of law enforcement are not supported by the data. Note that that does not discredit the emotions themselves—they're worthwhile and valid. I even feel them in cases of police abuse, such as Troy Davis and, for instance, the unwarranted pepper spraying of the UC Davis students. I would only caution you against letting those emotions override your reason and thereby jumping to conclusions that the data does not support.
> If someone wants to dispute that, the burden is on them to show that law enforcement is trustworthy.
There's nothing wrong with the opinion that the burden of proof should fall on someone other than one's self. However, I might add that in practice the burden falls on the contrarian. And when one's opinion is against one of the established pillars of society—for better or worse, with no judgment implied—that person is nearly by definition the contrarian.
—EDIT: And just for fun, from a quick Google trying to get better numbers, I'll point you to a real study on the topic: http://www.amazon.com/Convicted-but-Innocent-Wrongful-Convic...
A description of it (http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/ronhuff.htm) describes the arrived at number of wrongful convictions to be around 0.5%. More that half of those were caused by eyewitness misidentifications, leaving less than half to be caused by police malfeasance. The authors indicate that this is probably low, but: even doubled or tripled or quintupled, it seems that the data indicates the vast majority of law enforcement are not conspiring to convict everyone and anyone for a crime.
No. The reason it is reasonable to be wary of law enforcement is because the police don't care if you're guilty. Let me be more precise about what I mean by that. It may well be that most individual police officers really do care if you're innocent. But on a systemic level they do not care. They are trained not to care. Their job (they are told) is not to determine guilt or innocence. That (they are told) is the prosecutor's job. (And the prosecutors usually pass the buck to the jury.) The police are not rewarded for letting innocent people go, they are rewarded for making arrests on probable cause. (And prosecutors are not rewarded for letting innocent people go either, they are rewarded for securing convictions.)
I did not mean to cast aspersions on individual law enforcement officers. I'm sure most of them are fine upstanding people. They work hard. They put their lives on the line. They deal with the scumbags of the world so the rest of us don't have to. I respect them and I'm grateful that they are there.
But the police (and prosecutors) work within a system that actively discourages them from thinking about whether you are actually innocent (except insofar as your actual innocence might prevent them from convicting you) and encourages them to think instead only in terms of whether they can collect enough evidence to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in the mind of a jury, or to present to you a sufficiently credible threat of being able to convince a jury so that you'll accept a plea bargain. Your actual guilt is (and by their training ought to be) irrelevant to them.
BTW, there's a defensible argument that the system ought to be this way, which is that determining actual guilt or innocence is really, really hard, and individuals are easily swayed by emotions and other irrational factors (in both directions BTW) and this system is designed so that no one individual's irrationality can affect the outcome too much. Flawed as it is, it is arguable that it's the best we can do given human nature.
Postscript (since I just saw your edit): a 0.5% false conviction rate is very high. There are about 8 million convicts in the U.S. At 0.5%, that would be 40,000 wrongly convicted. That's about 500 years worth of lightning strike casualties.
> the vast majority of law enforcement are not conspiring to convict everyone and anyone for a crime
Clearly. But a conspiracy is not the only way to produce bad outcomes.
Please note that I do not hate cops by any means. In fact, all of the ones I have known have been great. But I've never taken a ride in the wrong side of a police car, either. Perhaps you should read this: http://www.innocenceproject.org/fix/Priority-Issues.php
I'm glad you're not my lawyer.
I know they used to be able to do that with typewriters, but can they do it with printers as well? I would suspect the imperfections of being too chaotic, or at least easy enough to change by changing the cartridge.
I personally don't see what the huge deal is. I mean we're not going to get hauled off for disseminating communist literature and I don't think anyone plans on printing currency.
So I don't know where the huge privacy concern whatever comes from, because unless you regularly forge time stamps on documents then I really don't know what the issue is.
* Large corporation whistleblowers (may have resources to hire PIs with connections to track)
* Civil dissent: think Arab Spring, not communist literature. The technology is not restricted to populations living under liberal regimes.
There might even be a bias against publicizing it by media, as the encoding has assisted police in several cases to track down criminals or alleged criminals.
Printer manufacturers are the ones voluntarily saying 'yes, master'. I have no control over any aspect of that situation.
> I didn't create, buy, or even sanction it.
But, you choose to live beneath it. If you don't like the rules, you can work to change it. This is a democracy though, so don't think that everyone will blindly agree with you.
This obviously assumes you are an American. If you aren't, then I really don't see the issue.
The whole is not merely the sum of the parts. And the people making up the government are nothing like me. For one, they believe government is a means to itself, while I do not.
> If you really want to enact change, you can
Citation needed.
> you choose to live beneath ithh
A one-possibility choice is not a choice. Your unstated assumption is that my personal life should be dependent on the government. I reject this. Also, there are not many places on Earth which aren't controlled by the US govt.
> If you don't like the rules, you can work to change it
And waste my life endlessly fighting others who wish to enforce their differing will on everyone, while we all perpetuate the democracy virus? That's how to become part of the problem!
You're being purposefully obtuse. I'm sorry everyone doesn't agree with you. Your opinion isn't the only one. Your teenage angst driven post is sad, if only because you really believe what you are spewing.
> I reject this.
Big words for someone who clearly doesn't.
Really, if you're being honest here in this post, I can't help but think your a bigger fraud then the people who supposedly shun.
We're just coming from radically different assumptions.
I've been there, thinking my vote mattered, thinking that conservatives just needed some enlightenment (if you prefer the converse - thinking that progressives just need some experience with the real world). Thinking that change happens eventually once enough people wake up and get the message.
But then I realized that we're all just fighting ourselves over surface issues. So much passion is poured into arguing to preserve the littlest bits of freedom while the pedagogues fan the simplistic tyranny of the other "side's" masses. Meanwhile, the organizations seeking increased importance and authority keep their eyes on the prize and offer their 'solutions' to the complex fundamental meta-issues. A battle may be won from time to time, but the system's invasion of and control over your life ratchets ever forward.
I certainly don't have a concrete solution to this whole mess, but the least I can do is avoid contributing to its legitimacy.
I wasn't referring to merely voting. I was referring to actually getting into politics and enacting change from the inside. If you just vote, you aren't enacting any change. You're signaling your belief that others are better able to handle this then you.
To accurately evaluate systems, one has to step back and look at their actual (emergent) behavior, not just their purported (axiomatic) behavior.
To accurately evaluate systems, one has to step back and look at their actual (emergent) behavior, not just their purported (axiomatic) behavior.
Let me start by supposing, as I think we all do, that this date-and-serial watermarking is indeed a form of spying on users of printers. Let me further suppose, perhaps more contentiously, that this international spying conspiracy of printer manufacturers is actually directed by some single nation-state (not an international conspiracy of nation-states), and that that state is the U.S.
EDIT: Regarding the leadership of the conspiracy, on the one hand the EFF apparently has FOIA responses that confirm that the U.S. is complicit, but otoh apparently the Dutch (and other countries) are using it too, so maybe I'm wrong to suppose that there's a single state at the head of the conspiracy.
It staggers me that you would not see why I would object to a foreign government (the U.S.) spying on me. Obviously it's not the _same_ issue as if my own government were spying on me.
Yeah. Doing something works.
In the same way one wouldn't have infiltrated the Soviets to reform communism, or the KKK to reform slavery, one instead subverts, undermines and networks around it. Like the flourishing black markets in the Soviet-era, or the underground railroad, the Counter-Economy can grow, and eventually overcome and abolish the violence of the State, through non-violent means.
Want untracked printers? Consider the risk vs. reward of hacking one and profiting from distributing it on a black/gray market. It will be more more effective and more ethical than voting or any nonsense like that.
Just ribbing on ya :p
It is true, there are other preventative measures, but any one measure can be beaten. It's like computer security- any computer can be hacked, it's just a game of making it hard enough to hack that it is not worth it, or takes too long.
The fact that this alternative is not even on the table adds to the impression that the U.S. government, as usual, is trying to use Big Bro techniques as a quick fix instead of coming up with real solutions.
BTW, I'm not sure if anyone prints fake Canadian money, but a few years ago some dude in Germany tried to print millions of dollars worth of fake Canadian Tire money :)
Many retailers in Canada have signs saying they'll refuse to take $100 bills (probably the reason for the recent roll-out of new $100 bills).
I suppose if "fingerprints" are so bad, we should probably outlaw ballistic analysis linking a bullet to the gun that fired it?
For some values of "the government" not including many governments; see $OPPRESSIVE_REGIME.
There's a lot of stuff "the government" does now that would have been unthinkable before various terrorist bombing attempts. Really, forcing everyone to remove their shoes before boarding a plane?
And, if you doubt that the US[1] spies on its own citizens you should have a look at the Echelon programme, where a legal loophole was used by the US to gather intelligence on its citizens. (The US gov can't do it legally, so they pass a name onto another gov involved in Echelon.)
[1] US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
The Canadian mint actually produces a lot of coinage for other countries, is one of the most advanced in new techs, etc. They tend to sell out all of their collection coins, especially the large gold ones (including a 1kg coin).
The game of making it hard enough/expensive enough to have it not worthwhile is the goal of every currency. The new 100$ bill definitely succeeds.
Of course Australians invented the plastic notes so they could go surfing with their wallets.
Within a couple of years, the old style notes become so exceptionally rare in everyday transactions that the presence of one raises eyebrows, and is inspected carefully. While our older style notes are technically still "legal tender", I doubt you'd find a single retailer across the country that would accept it.
The Australian switch to polymer meant an entirely new suite of banknotes which bear almost no resemblance to the paper ones they replaced.
Plus, people will complain about the new ones. :)
The classic example is the penny. Get rid of it! You can still collect them and read about them on wikipedia, you just won't have to deal with them while buying your double cheeseburgers any more.
The classic case was the huge Northern Bank robbery in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 2004 -- the thieves stole around 7% of all the Northern Bank banknotes in circulation (currency in NI and Scotland is issued by banks that possess a license to print money, not by a nationalized institution like the Federal Reserve). It was cheaper for the bank to reissue the entire currency and cancel the old banknotes than to trouser the loss, so within 4 months the stolen notes were worthless except as toilet paper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Bank_robbery
Once there's a noticeable proportion of forged coinage or banknotes in circulation public confidence in the currency drops like a stone. At that point, the only option is to recall and replace.
The reason this hasn't happened in the USA is because there are so damn many dollar bills in circulation -- around $829Bn as of 2007. The cost of recalling and reissuing that little lot would be distinctly non-trivial ...
http://www.ny.frb.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html
For the classic currency-catastrophe-caused-by-forgery, you need to read up on the Portuguese banking crisis of 1925, one of the biggest currency frauds in history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Edit: Of course I learn after posting, apparently EURion is not what Photoshop looks for, but rather a digital watermark. The detection is given to Adobe as a binary from a security firm.
The yellow doesn't photocopy well so if you have to use such a printer, you can erase the tracking dots on your anonymously distributed pamphlets by monochrome photocopying at Kinkos the master copy you produced with your home or business laser.
The EFF has something on this and cracked the code a long time ago:
They are obviously doing it under legal pressure - so where is the law on the books?
This means it's a secret law that (at least the) American public is unable to inspect and attempt to abolish.
Perhaps it's a secret part of the DMCA? What other laws do we not know about?
Lots of industries adopt practices like this to _avoid_ a situation where something will become a matter of law, because it has little or no impact on the sales of their products. If you're a color laser printer manufacturer, agreeing to do this is probably a lot better than maybe having the government regulate sales of your product or otherwise add red tape.
Try photocopying a $20 bill on a copier and see for yourself.
So everything you copied at the office or at FedEx Office is available even after you leave:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/19/eveningnews/main64...
Really, anything you print, no matter what it is printed on with enough time an effort could be track back to at least the model and type of printer.
Edit: Or just add yellow dots to the document I'm printing?