Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents

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Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents

 

Practice embeds hidden, traceable data in every page printed.

 

Jason Tuohey, Medill News Service

Monday, November 22, 2004

 

 

WASHINGTON--Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer,

shine

an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass.

You

might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printer there that

could

be used to trace the document back to you.

 

According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial

number

and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers

on

every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United

States,

already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.

 

Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser

printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro

series, put the " serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots "

in

every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page,

nestled within the printed words and margins.

 

" It's a trail back to you, like a license plate, " Crean says.

 

The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page,

along

with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the

naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying

this

tracking process is to shine a blue LED light--say, from a keychain laser

flashlight--on your page and use a magnifier.

 

 

Crime Fighting vs. Privacy

Laser-printing technology makes it incredibly easy to counterfeit money and

documents, and Crean says the dots, in use in some printers for decades,

allow

law enforcement to identify and track down counterfeiters.

 

However, they could also be employed to track a document back to any person

or

business that printed it. Although the technology has existed for a long

time,

printer companies have not been required to notify customers of the feature.

 

Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeiting specialist with the U.S. Secret Service,

stresses that the government uses the embedded serial numbers only when

alerted

to a forgery. " The only time any information is gained from these documents

is

purely in [the case of] a criminal act, " she says.

 

John Morris, a lawyer for The Center for Democracy and Technology , says,

" That

type of assurance doesn't really assure me at all, unless there's some type

of

statute. " He adds, " At a bare minimum, there needs to be a notice to

consumers. "

 

If the practice disturbs you, don't bother trying to disable the encoding

mechanism--you'll probably just break your printer.

 

Crean describes the device as a chip located " way in the machine, right near

the

laser " that embeds the dots when the document " is about 20 billionths of a

second " from printing.

 

" Standard mischief won't get you around it, " Crean adds.

 

Neither Crean nor Pagano has an estimate of how many laser printers,

copiers,

and multifunction devices track documents, but they say that the practice is

commonplace among major printer companies.

 

" The industry absolutely has been extraordinarily helpful [to law

enforcement], "

Pagano says.

 

According to Pagano, counterfeiting cases are brought to the Secret Service,

which checks the documents, determines the brand and serial number of the

printer, and contacts the company. Some, like Xerox, have a customer

database,

and they share the information with the government.

 

Crean says Xerox and the government have a good relationship. " The U.S.

government had been on board all along--they would actually come out to our

labs, " Crean says.

 

 

History

Unlike ink jet printers, laser printers, fax machines, and copiers fire a

laser

through a mirror and series of lenses to embed the document or image on a

page.

Such devices range from a little over $100 to more than $1000, and are

designed

for both home and office.

 

Crean says Xerox pioneered this technology about 20 years ago, to assuage

fears

that their color copiers could easily be used to counterfeit bills.

 

" We developed the first (encoding mechanism) in house because several

countries

had expressed concern about allowing us to sell the printers in their

country, "

Crean says.

 

Since then, he says, many other companies have adopted the practice.

 

 

The United States is not the only country teaming with private industry to

fight

counterfeiters. A recent article points to the Dutch government as using

similar

anticounterfeiting methods, and cites Canon as a company with encoding

technology. Canon USA declined to comment.