Giant photocopying firm Xerox has admitted designing its colour photocopiers so that they put a hidden code on your copy that will help the US government identify you.According to Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, all his company’s laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, put the serial number of each machine in yellow dots on the page.
News source: TheInquirer He told the Medill News Service that the dots only show up if you look at the document with a magnifying glass while shining an LED beam on its surface.
This will mean that if any document shows up in a criminal inquiry the spooks will be able to track the document to you photocopier.
Apparently it is designed to catch crooks who counterfeit money on a photocopier, although it is hard to see how anyone call fall for fake photocopied cash.
It is more likely that the technology can be used to to track a document back to any person or business that printed it.
According to a SpokesSpook for the secret service, the photocopy industry had been extraordinarily helpful to them. Xerox has a customer database and shares the information whenever the spooks ask.
What is more spooky is that the technology has been around for a long time, it is just that the photocopy outfits have never felt fit to tell their customers.
What is angering civil rights groups is that there is no law on the statutes to protect people from the misuse of this type of surveillance.
