On October 13th, the Electronic Frontier Foundation posted their findings that many recent model color laser printers embed a subtle identification code in every printed page. The obvious use for such a code is for the United States Secret Service and the treasury agencies of other nations to track and prosecute counterfeiters. However, civil liberties groups and the blogosphere are currently up in arms about this finding as it theoretically allows the tracking of anonymous sources back to their origin regardeless of whether the activity is illegal or not.
Until now, the assumption was that forensic investigators were able to track just the makes and models of most communications devices. After all, this ability has existed since the early days of the printing press. A subtle drop of a letter or a tell-tale tooling mark on the face of one of the letter heads was all they needed to profile the machine and to narrow the field of suspects.
This ability has extended into the digital age where device profiles exist for everything that produces a document or a file. Digital cameras, scanners, MP3 players and word processing programs are no exception. Have you ever looked at the extra data that a Microsoft Word document contains about the author, the author’s computer, and any contributors? There’s a lot of data in there! Now, we know that the last hop in the identification trail, from the manufacturer to the consumer, is now more easily identifiable.
Well, there’s no denying that if you print or publish anything, you run the risk of being found out. If you were previously acting on another assumption, you’ve just been lucky up to this point.
