After yesterdays post about Xerox making copies of documents for the CIA during the cold war a friend sent me a link to this site (SeeingYellow).

For those of you who don’t know about this there is a conspiracy theory (which I actually think may be true) about how printer companies make their printers print mysterious yellow dots in certain places in order to allow law enforcement agencies to track down the source of the printout.

In the days of things like type writers it was actually possible to match a particular type writer to a particular page by the printing as each type writer had a slightly different wear pattern on the letters, it was even possible in the days of dot matrix printers to still do this although I’m not entirely sure how reliable this is. Of course its much harder to do this with modern printers as there is no “wear pattern” or anything that acts as a fingerprint.

I love these kinds of conspiracy theories… Like the governments have nothing better to do than track down who printed what… obviously the way to prevent them tracking you down is don’t print anything or use someone else’s printer.