Two nice articles about Seeing Yellow. Today, from Congressional Quarterly (which, apparently, %95 of the US Congress reads):

CQ WEEKLY – VANTAGE POINT
July 23, 2007

The Dot Matrix: How printers help federal agents and give privacy advocates fits
By Kathryn A. Wolfe, CQ Staff

What is your color laser printer telling the government about you?

Quite possibly a lot, according to digital privacy advocates. Pages generated by such printers often include a series of yellow dots invisible to the unassisted human eye — a sort of digital fingerprint that links any given printout to the place where it was generated….[snip]

And an excellent article from Linux Journal:

Seeing yellow over color printer tracking devices

By Bruce Byfield on Thu, 2007-07-19 20:13.A series of encodings on printouts from color laser printers to discourage counterfeiting? At first, the idea sounds like the urban legend from a couple of decades ago that claimed you could hear Satanic messages when you play vinyl records backwards. Yet the evidence from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is that the encodings are embedded in color printers from all major manufacturers. Moreover, the issues raised by the practice have caused Free Software Foundation director Benjamin Mako Hill and other members of the Computing Culture group at the MIT Media Lab to begin the Seeing Yellow campaign to stop the practice.

The campaign takes its name from the nature of the encoding, which takes the form of yellow dots printed across the entire page of a printout. The dots are invisible to the unaided eye, but can be seen by placing an intense blue LED light behind a printout in a darkened room. Alternatively, the dots can be seen in a scanned copy of a printout with a resolution of at least 600dpi. They become even clearer when the scanned copy is opened in a graphics program like the GIMP, and only the blue channel is visible (Dialogues -> Channels). However, for the most part, the public can only guess what information is carried by the yellow dots.

In fact, except for Toshiba, whose documentation mentions an unspecified tracking device for printouts, most manufacturers do nothing to make consumers aware that their printouts can be tracked.

In addition to the inability to consent to being monitored, the situation also raises issues about privacy and the right to anonymity. Pointing out that the eighteenth century Federalist Papers, a collection of 85 letters that advocated ratification of the American Constitution, were originally published anonymously, Hill says, “It’s perfectly legitimate for people to want communicate anonymously. Anonymity is absolutely essential to democracy. The [Federalist Papers] are an example of how anonymous communication can lead to some of the most important political changes.”

Hill goes on to note, that, ironically, that people who have written to the campaign insisting that the innocent have nothing to worry about take good care to remain anonymous themselves. Even Hewlett-Packard employees responding to privacy concerns, he says, sign their emails not with their names, but simply with “Privacy.” “It’s funny,” Hill says, “But people are choosing to remain anonymous while telling me that people shouldn’t do that.”

The immediate impetus for the campaign was a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that one man who contacted his printer manufacturer for information about how to turn the tracking device off soon found himself being questioned by the U.S. Secret Service. By contrast, Hill says, “We want it to be perfectly normal to complain about the lack of anonymity.”

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