Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare Come True by Mark Dice

Author:Mark Dice [Dice, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Resistance
Published: 2011-06-20T21:00:00+00:00

Tracking Documents You Print

While it should be common knowledge that the government and computer savvy hackers can track a person’s Internet usage and search through the contents of a person’s hard drive, most people would never imagine that a simple document printed from their computer could be traced back to them, especially if it were something like a page of text that had no personal information on it.

Laser printers are no longer expensive units only used by large companies for high page count documents and rapid printing. Laser printers have become common in households due to their quality and dramatically lower prices than in the past. But what nobody really knows is that most manufactures secretly designed a feature into laser printers and photocopiers that encode the printer’s serial number onto each page that is printed by using a series of tiny dots that most people can’t even see with the naked eye. Of course, consumers are not told of this process, and printer manufacturers like to keep quiet about it.

Peter Crean, a senior researcher at Xerox, admitted his company’s laser printers, copiers, and multifunction workstations, all secretly put the serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots on every printout that can’t be seen by the naked eye. “It’s a trail back to you, like a license plate,” Crean said.226

The reason for the secret encoding is said to assist in fighting counterfeit money and fraudulent documents, and is a method that has been used since the 1980s. “The industry absolutely has been extraordinarily helpful [to law enforcement],” says Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeiting specialist with the US Secret Service, the agency in charge of tracking counterfeiters.227

Peter Crean of Xerox said the government worked with the company to develop the technology in the 1980s because of fears that their advanced copiers could easily be used to print counterfeit money.

It’s likely that the Secret Service or other government agencies can use the Carnivore system to send out pings searching for a specific printer serial number that can be detected if the printer is installed on a computer that is connected to the Internet. Of course, when a printer is purchased, the serial number is linked to the person’s credit card or checking account who bought it. While it may be tough to argue that this technology isn’t good for catching counterfeiters, what else could it be used for?

What if a government whistle blower prints out sensitive and damaging documents and anonymously (or so he thinks) sends them to the media? He could then, without even suspecting it, be linked to the documents. Did you design and print out some inflammatory leaflets about a powerful senator or congressperson and put them on people’s doors in your community? These flyers could be traced back to you.

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