Barry
PAPER TRAIL Is your printer spying on you? It could be, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group that's not given to crazy conspiracy theories (though it has revealed a fair number of crazy conspiracies). In a report issued last week, the foundation warns that "in a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the U.S. government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information."
"And what's worse," the report adds, "there are no laws to prevent abuse."
Citing a report from the American Civil Liberties Union asserting that since 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected more than 1,100 of the group's documents, as well as documents from other groups like Greenpeace, the foundation said that "in the current political climate, it's not hard to imagine the government using the ability to determine who may have printed what document for purposes other than identifying counterfeiters."
Eff.org offers plenty of analysis, including pictorial evidence of printed documents that appear to have been encoded. There is also a list of printers that do or do not encode documents.
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
