BAHRAIN, 18 October 2005 — The security of thousands of governmental, commercial, and private digitally created documents in the Gulf, many of which could be of secret or sensitive nature, could be vulnerable to tracking by the US government a recent report revealed.
Models of laser printers widely marketed and used by governments, businesses, and individuals here contain secret coded messages that enable those who know the code and are able to decipher it to trace when and where the document was created at the very least.
The secret code that is imbedded into print-outs made by some laser printers had been cracked by a research team led by the San Francisco based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
EFF said yesterday that the secretly hidden color code created by some color laser printers allows the US government to track the origin of the print-out by placing tiny dots that show when and where the person made it.
The US Secret Service had admitted that the tracking information was part of a deal made with selected color laser printer manufacturers supposedly to identify counterfeiters, but the nature of the nature of the private information encoded in the document was not revealed.
The dots are yellow, less than one millimeter in diameter, and are typically repeated over each page of a document. The pattern to be seen one must use a blue light, a magnifying glass, or a microscope.
“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.
“So far, we’ve only broken the code for Xerox DocuColor printers, but we believe that other models from other manufacturers include the same personally identifiable information in their tracking dots.”
The dots were found on color prints from machines made by Brother, Canon, Dell, Epson, HP, Lexmark, Xerox, and other manufactures all of which are widely used in the Gulf and the rest of the world.
EFF expressed concern that no laws were in place to prevent the government from abusing information obtained through this new tracking technique despite the fact that Xerox, which 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 with the Service maintaining that the information was only used for criminal counterfeit investigations.
“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,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien.
“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?”
EFF, which has developed an automated program to decode the code of the Xerox DocuColor prints, is still working on cracking the codes from other printers.
