Tell that to those maimed and murdered by him and to their families. And as population density increases the odds of another Ted Kaczynski becomes greater and his ability to do harm increases.

“these days”??? Why?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we really do live in a dangerous world. I think that Bush has over reacted but complacency is equally deadly.

The risk from law enforcement is greater than the risk from independent criminals.

[citation needed] It’s confirmation bias. Here as elsewhere on the internet it is not unusual for people to over react to news items that only serve to confirm their fears. You get an echo chamber like effect where one report of police brutality in dumbfuck USA gets conflated into an international crisis. People need to calm the fuck down a bit.

Tell that to those maimed and murdered by him and to their families. And as population density increases the odds of another Ted Kaczynski becomes greater and his ability to do harm increases.

What about all the unseen damage done by the curtailment of our freedom?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we really do live in a dangerous world. I think that Bush has over reacted but complacency is equally deadly.

We’ve always lived in a dangerous world, but most of that is blowback from the oppression of these “law enforcement tools”.

Freedom is worth the danger, but more freedom would also reverse this vicious cycle of ratcheting police state and violent rebellion.

Hardly, because this digital equivalent was intentionally designed-in, correct? The bottom line is that this is irrelevant via historical context. A zero-sum development. No new freedoms were gained, and no additional freedoms were lost. Skim over a comprehensive text on forensics, and you’ll quickly realize that anonymity dissappeared the moment science, technology, and deductive reasoning became prevalent in society; in other words, centuries to millenia ago. Or, if that’s too dry, re-read a Sherlock Holmes or Judge Dee (Dee Goong An) novel for mild historical perspective.

I’m no fan whatsoever of behind-closed-doors tyranny, yet the obviousness, sheer clumsiness, and incovenience of this method for any type of useful surveilling purposes screams to me that there are much more subtle, efficient, and vicious ways by which our freedom is opressed daily that are far more warranting of our concern and energy. Seek out and find them, society needs you.

Simply copy their yellow dot pattern and replicate it on your own paper which says something like “Lets commit crime X!” and get it to the NSA/CIA/FBI.

Elected official screwed.

The FBI and CIA in the past have kept examples of every paper and every typewriter commercially manufactured in order to aid criminal investigation. The problem is that the uniformity of modern printers makes it more difficult for them to do their job.

The solution is not to eliminate these printer fingerprints but to make sure that they are not abused. The way we do that, I think, is through increased government transparency. Or in other words, who watches the watchers? We should.

I didn’t think this was a secret. I run a commercial-sized digital printer, and the repair tech told me about these. Stopping counterfeiting is the reason (at least the acknowledged reason). If some idiot scans a bill and passes it off, they go back to the company to find out which machine made it. A lot of machines and programs have software to stop counterfeiting as well, as a poster above noted.

That’s something completely different. Thats the “o” marks on new currency (both new new Fed Notes and on Euros). e.g. the tiny 0 in “10″ or “20″ marked all over the bills.

As Ehka indicates, how does one maintain civil liberties and at the same time allow law enforcement the tools it needs to prosecute people like the Unibomber? Ted Kaczynski was a smart guy, he knew that even things like screws could be traced to point of sale so he machined his own screws.

You don’t. If the “tools” conflict with civil liberties, then liberty takes precedence. The risk of a few nuts like Ted Kaczynski abusing their freedom to cause mayhem is the price of Freedom for everyone else. (That, and freedom costs $1.05.)

Many things are “finger printed” in this way and it seems to me to be a legitimate role of law enforcement. It enables them to track down and prosecute criminals.

This is a pre-emptive strike.

Obviously it can also be abused. Limiting the ability of the law to find and convict criminals these days doesn’t seem to me to be a good idea.

“these days”??? Why? The risk from law enforcement is greater than the risk from independent criminals.

I used to work as a cashier some time ago. When high quality color printers came out we had a number of people try to pass counterfeit bills. We had to be trained how to tell them from legitimate bills. Inserting code into the printer so that you can convict counterfeiters is a good solution. Removing printer codes like this would allow criminals to get away with their crimes.

No, it’s passing the buck. If the currency can be easily forged, than the currency issuer needs to improve the security of the currency, not make everyone else cater to their insecure design.

I think that the secrecy, lack of transparency and accountability of this administration is to blame. We need better government not less of it.

“I promise to oppress you in a more thoughtful, more effective manner! I will utilize the latest methods in oppression technology, and oppress you the right way!“

The solution is not to eliminate these printer fingerprints but to make sure that they are not abused. The way we do that, I think, is through increased government transparency. Or in other words, who watches the watchers? We should.

Wrong. The solution is to use direct action with our own tools and undermine (or eliminate) these printer fingerprints.

Power is never given; it is seized.

You’re being treated as a criminal by the assumption that you might use a printer to facilitate a crime. Since criminals are in the extreme minority, it amounts to a form of mass-surveillance.

Sorry, but I don’t subscribe to David Brin’s transparent society as a viable solution. Our right to anonymous speech must be actively defended by the People first-hand.

We need to consider the fact that criminals may have the power to decrypt these codes as well. This information — who printed the letter, when it was printed, etc — is more dangerous in their hands than in the government’s.

This type of information is no different than that gained via the old-school method of matching typewritten documents to a typewriter via the wear marks on the individual letters. In that particular case, would you blame physics for leading a “pre-emptive strike” for causing a “fingerprint” by which a document could be linked to the typwriter which made it?

Of course it’s different. Typewriter forensics occurs after the fact. Typewriters weren’t designed on purpose to have forensic tells.

But in this case, printer manufacturers are going out of their way to include this “feature”. That’s what makes it pre-emptive — assuming that individual users will commit crimes before they have any probable cause of doing so.

I think it’s fair to make the analogy of tapping everyone’s phone on the off-chance that they might say something related to a crime. That’s called mass-surveillance, and it’s an affront to our right to privacy.

Hardly, because this digital equivalent was intentionally designed-in, correct?

Indeed.

The bottom line is that this is irrelevant via historical context. A zero-sum development.

Using artificial means to maintain a convenience of the status quo is unacceptable. Your line of reasoning is the same one used to justify CALEA and other retroactive wiretapping provisions. Just because police were accustomed to tapping an actual wire in POTS is no rationale for artificially adding wiretapping-like features into new VoIP systems.

Step #2: Program the printers with a future date & time.

Step #3: When you make a run of invites to your protest and include contact information, use printer A. When you print a run of anarchistic calls for violence and death in the streets, use printer B, and DON’T include your group’s name and website. Hire homeless people to distribute them.

The big “discovery” is that the manufacturers designed them that way. So what? The only people they’re going to catch are the teenagers who printed out a bomb threat on their library’s computer, or the people who mail threats to the government (a GOOD way to avoid capture), or something equally as foolish.

If you want to make anonymous, printed texts, so NOBODY can identify who made it, (which every writer really wants these days) it is not hard–just use a printer and then get rid of it! There are people who can even fake a printer or typewriter to look like another. Or, you can print it out at your local copy shop and pay cash. Or, you can carve your own block print and build a letterpress using parts from a dumpster. You just can’t use the ink jet that came free with your Dell that you paid for with a credit card that is still on your desk propping up your highlighted copy of The Anarchist Cookbook and your bag of fertilizer.

Hey man, I distrust the state as much as the next guy, but if the government is wasting their time tracking down 12 year-olds misusing scanners, I say, hey, let ‘em.

This information — who printed the letter, when it was printed, etc — is more dangerous in their hands than in the government’s.

How do you account for that?

Based on your last comment it’s clear now that we’re writing at cross purposes. On this particular topic, you maintain that technology should result in positive, non-zero-sum progress w.r.t. privacy, and thus are critical of the design choices mentioned. In other words, you’re focused on increasing privacy when technology allows for it, and find opportunity cost in the transference of status quo across technological paradigms.

I’m holding the perspective that transferring the status quo across technological paradigms does not decrease privacy. Thus, I view that in this particular case it is not worth the time or energy resources to be concerned, when there are other, new technology/privacy paradigms with no prior analog that may result in a negative non-zero-sum state and therefore warrant attention.

You’re motivated to exert resources to see that we increase the glass of water more than half-full when possible, I’m motivated to exert resources to ensure that the water line doesn’t fall below half-full.

You’re offense, I’m defense, we’re both pushing in the same direction, and the only real difference is which side of the line we’re looking at. Ok then, case closed.

I’d heard about this before and wondered if it was a response to the Unabomber being done in by his manual typerwriter. Some FBI guy realized that if Kaczynski had used a computer’s printer they’d never have had the physical evidence to convict him. A lovely irony.

Because certainly government agents never abuse their powers of office for personal or political reasons?

Creating the surveillance infrastructure in turn creates the opportunistic incentives to use it. And historically speaking, this has been a slippery slope phenomenon — emergency powers originally aimed at terrorists are expanded to include increasing circles of ever more mundane criminal activity until it’s a ubiquitous standard tool of police power.

Actually I did ’cause I believe there is a direct relationship between intellectual curiosity and sense of humor.

I also discovered that I really need a blue light key chain, but I think five bucks, is way too cheap. I wonder if they will sell it to me for twenty?

As for those pesky yellow dots. Is it possible to hack your printer firmware to stop it from doing this? Or better, get it to say “Fuck you Secret Service!” In their own not-so-secret-anymore dot language of course.

Thanks EFF! You guys rock!

Every time you say ‘instructables,’
My mind thinks you really said ‘lunchables,’
And I get a weird feeling in both of my testicles,
Which is probably merely psychosexual.

According to the author, it makes a random yellow dot pattern that can be overlaid onto a document you printed. He points out that this won’t thwart any government attempt to “track you down” but it will keep your boss from using that instructables video against you. Basically, the random noise just makes it harder to figure out which dots are the identifiers.

This is zero-sum in the same way that DRM is zero-sum, or in the sense that Harrison Bergeron was a story about zero-sum principles.

A perfectly good technology comes along (e.g. digital audio distribution) only to be crippled by requiring an authentication server that is later turned off, rendering the advancement impotent. We are left with the zero-sum proposition that the media decays just like magnetic tapes decay. To echo Zuzu’s point, this time the decay has been engineered into the system.

So, while advances in printing were once also advances in privacy, they have now been engineered with handicapping measures that mitigate and reverse a portion of this advance. Zero-sum, indeed!

I guess the lesson is, if you have a secret, don’t write it down/print it/save it to disk.

I’m sure it would take a little jiggery pokery to get similar spacing and target areas lined up with the original dots.

Of course if the pattern followed a simple grid as it appeared to in the video; just print a yellow dot at every grid vertex. Security via obscurity that may actually work… Well, assuming that enough people do the same thing. :)

It should be quite simple to write a self calibrating application for people with a scanner.

(Notice the professional software developer weasel words there: “should be quite simple”.)

It’s a trick to sell more yellow toner!

Direct action is fine but it doesn’t always work and doesn’t solve the underlying problem here. As Ehka indicates, how does one maintain civil liberties and at the same time allow law enforcement the tools it needs to prosecute people like the Unibomber? Ted Kaczynski was a smart guy, he knew that even things like screws could be traced to point of sale so he machined his own screws.

Many things are “finger printed” in this way and it seems to me to be a legitimate role of law enforcement. It enables them to track down and prosecute criminals. Obviously it can also be abused. Limiting the ability of the law to find and convict criminals these days doesn’t seem to me to be a good idea.

I used to work as a cashier some time ago. When high quality color printers came out we had a number of people try to pass counterfeit bills. We had to be trained how to tell them from legitimate bills. Inserting code into the printer so that you can convict counterfeiters is a good solution. Removing printer codes like this would allow criminals to get away with their crimes.

So you have on one hand the legitimate needs of law enforcement and on the other legitimate concerns about civil rights. People are understandably worried about the abuse of power. I think that the secrecy, lack of transparency and accountability of this administration is to blame. We need better government not less of it.

I suppose that’s just hopeful wording on my part – I’d like to think that, currently, the government is not going to abuse its ability to find out who printed something.

What I was referring to was a hypothetical scenario where, for example, a person wants to tell the police about a [powerful] criminal they know, with complete anonymity. I know post is a bit archaic, but let’s say this person sends an anonymous letter to the police.

If said powerful criminal can get his hands on that letter, and figure out how to decode these yellow dots, and figure out who owns that printer, etc., then we have a situation where a technology that was intended to help find criminals is now used to help criminals find victims.

Now, I recognize that this is not going to happen every day, and think that privacy of normal citizens should be a good enough reason not to mark pages with these dots. However, it’s still something to think about.