By Debbie Schlussel
As a conservative who supports law enforcement and fighting Islamic terrorism, I’m all for tracing where terrorist attacks come from and finding the evidence with ease. I’m also for surveilling and listening to phone calls when there is reasonable suspicion that the person is involved or might be involved in terrorist plotting or is talking to someone who might.
But this is going WAAAAY too far:

The affordability and growing popularity of color laser printers is raising concerns among civil liberties advocates that your privacy may not be worth the paper you’re printing on.

More manufacturers are outfitting greater numbers of laser printers with technology that leaves microscopic yellow dots on each printed page to identify the printer’s serial number ‚Äî and ultimately, you, says the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the leading watchdogs of electronic privacy.
The technology has been around for years, but the declining price of laser printers and the increasing number of models with this feature is causing renewed concerns.
The dots, invisible to the naked eye, can be seen using a blue LED light and are used by authorities such as the Secret Service to investigate counterfeit bills made with laser printers, says Lorelei Pagano, director of the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group.
Privacy advocates worry that the little-known technology could ensnare political dissidents, whistle-blowers or anyone who prints materials that authorities want to track.
“There’s nothing about this technology that limits its application to counterfeit investigations,” says Seth Schoen, a computer programmer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Some people who aren’t doing anything wrong may have their privacy threatened.” Schoen’s tests have found the dots produced by 111 color laser printers made by 13 companies including Xerox, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Epson and Brother.
The dots are produced only on laser devices and not ink-jet printers, which are most commonly used at home. But laser printers, which produce more durable images, are becoming increasingly popular as their price has dropped to as low as $300, says Angele Boyd, a vice president of IDC Research.
Although laser printers made up only 4% of the 33 million printers sold last year in the USA, their sales have been growing by double digits since 2004, Boyd says.
The technology began as laser printers were first produced in the mid-1980s and governments and banks feared an explosion of counterfeiting, Xerox spokesman Bill McKee says. “In many cases, it is a requirement to do business internationally that the printers are equipped with this technology,” McKee says.
The dots tell authorities the serial number of a printer that made a document. In some cases, it also tells the time and date it was printed, Pagano says. “The Secret Service is the only U.S. body that has the ability to decode the information,” she says.
Printer makers “cooperate with law enforcement” and will tell authorities where a printer was made and sold, McKee says.
The Secret Service uses the dots only to investigate counterfeiting, agency spokesman Ed Donovan says.

PUH-LEEZE. Criminals will find a way to get around this, and only you and I–innocent citizens–will be the ones this will be used against. And not necessarily by law enforcement, but other parties who might sue you, etc.
Sure, you might ask why a person will care if what they printed out is traceable if they never print out threats. Well, I’ll tell you why. People send anonymous letters for various reasons–and it’s not always for the purpose of threats.
I, myself, for example, can now disclose that in 2004, I sent an anonymous letter to a political interest group–a whorish organization that doesn’t really care about what it pretends to stand for–an anonymous letter asking them not to endorse a woman by the name of Lois Shulman, a sleazy woman who claimed to support their interests. I sent them a past newspaper article I’d saved in which she came out against the group and its positions and I reversed their plan to endorse her. As a result she lost her race for the Michigan House of Representatives. I sent the letter anonymously for a reason. I didn’t want anyone to know I was behind it. It might have changed their response.
I don’t believe for a second that this new development with printers will help solve a single crime. But what it will do is create a black market on old printers. And it will create subpoenas in a lot o lawsuits, in which lawyers demand companies identify these invisible identifiers for them.
It’s an incredible invasion of privacy and not a good development at all in America. V. I. Lenin and other Communist leaders dreamed of this day in Big Brother’s growing set of encroachments.
Well, now you have another reason not to register your printer with the manufacturer to take advantage of the warranty.
Big Brother is now Morbidly Obese Brother.