How printers are watching us

Photo: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Not long ago, FBI officers detained Rialiti Lee Winnerwho worked for the company Pluribus International Corporation and had the highest tolerance to the state secret. According to the US authorities, the girl issued secret documents concerning the investigation of the CIA, the FBI and the NSA about the “hacker attacks from Moscow” and the election results, scanned them and sent them to the media.

Air force reports that the American intelligence services managed to figure out a woman thanks to a printer. It turned out that the documents transmitted in the media, with careful consideration can be seen yellow dots, forming a rectangular pattern, repeated from page to page.

Further research showed that this “pattern” carries information about the exact number and time when the pages were printed: 6 hours 20 minutes 9 May 2017 of the year. In any case, it should be the time that the printer’s own clock showed when it printed these pages. In addition, the dots are encrypted with the serial number of the printer.

The FBI did not officially confirm that microdots were used to identify the suspect, and the organization refused to comment on this article. In the affidavit, FBI officials argued that Winner admitted to printing out a secret report by the National Security Agency about Russia's alleged interference in the US presidential election.

Despite the fact that the American special services refused to disclose the details of how Winner was calculated, the story of micro-points on a secret document aroused genuine interest.

“When we zoom in on the photo, they are clearly visible,” says Ted Han of Document Cloud, one of the first to pay attention to the dots. “It’s interesting and quite remarkable that these things are being used.”

Another expert, Rob Graham, published in his blog post, which explains how to find and decipher microdots.

Based on their location relative to the overlay stencil, you can determine the hours, minutes and date, as well as the printer number. Several experts, deciphering the points on the document, got the same result.

Microdots are used for quite some time. American human rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) (based on the protection of the rights enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in connection with the advent of new communication technologies - ed.), has compiled and constantly updates list of color printersusing this technology.

The photographs below, provided by the EFF, show how to decipher these points.

Photo: FLORIAN HEISE / WIKIPEDIA

Photo: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Just in case, keep in mind: if you ever need to understand what the dots mean on any document important to you, Electronic Frontier Foundation the site has for this special interactive tool.

Alan Woodward, a security expert at the University of Surrey, says there are many ways to track who printed or accessed documents.

“Organizations like the NSA keep records of every time something is printed, not to mention they have various methods of tracking printed documents,” he says. “They, of course, know that people know about yellow dots, so they don’t rely only on them.”

About ethics of accession by the printer of certain information to the printed document without the knowledge of the printout has long been heated debate. The opinion was expressed that this is a violation of human rights, and one of the research projects of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received more than 45 thousands of complaints about the manufacturers of printers, whose devices cause microdots.

And yet, as many believe, such hidden security measures to ensure the secrecy of important documents are completely justified in some cases. "There are things that governments should be able to keep secret," says Ted Han.

However, he adds, “I hope that these guys think not only about their own operational security, but also about the fact that journalists also need to protect themselves and their sources.”

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