List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots

Paying cash for the printer should mitigate things. At best they can tell something like that the page was printed by something that passed through a BestBuy warehouse in your town in the first quarter of last year, and that's it.

Buy a printer hundreds of miles away from home while on a road trip, pay cash, and then do whatever you want with it: print yourself a hundred million dollars and enjoy your print-irement. :)

Simply the awareness about the possibility of tracking goes a long way.

Could they narrow down to any printers of that brand bought with cash in the country and request surveillance footage? Then build a shortlist from there. I imagine cash purchases of printers would be fairly rare and help limit the list.

Buying a printer second-hand with cash might cover this situation.

Burner printers...

The problem is that it gets easier and easier to track everything.

In the future maybe each pack of paper will have a steganographic tracking code - slight white variations for example, so you could track the paper to the selling shop.

The camera, the scanner could also do this.

And as more and more systems get integrated, they could see that your car and your phone were present at the time in the shop where the paper was sold.

A second hand printer can still be tracked if you buy it through craig list, even through a long chain - the original printer was sold in a shop, the CCTV and facial recognition and phone location identified the original buyer, the buyer Craiglist account sold such a printer second hand on some date, he was tracked to some location, you were also tracked to same location at same time, you were pictured carrying a big package, your high-resolution electricity metering suddenly shows that you have a laser printer running in your house, and that you printed exactly 53 pages on the day of the leak, ...

As you can see, it will become harder and harder to do anything anonymously.

CSI will look naive compared to what will be possible in the future. Infinite zoom and camera viewpoint rotation will be trivial if you'll have one little camera in every door, every street sign, every corner, every car, every little thing.

That's all they're going to get anyway. I've never heard of a retail store recording the serial number of all their merchandise, much less associating it with a customer's credit card.

The utility to law enforcement is being able to prove a connection between the evidence and a suspect after they've obtained a warrant. Or in this case, it was a NSA owned printer so they already had the serial number without needing a warrant.

And if you are foolish enough to register with the manufacturer, the NSA already has your serial number without needing a warrant.

If your printer is on a network, it can 'phone home' in most cases. They now know which IP address the printer lives behind. Get compromising document > look up serial number from dots > look up IP address from serial number > get address for IP from ISP (through means fair or foul). Payment option is irrelevant.

> In the future maybe each pack of paper will have a steganographic tracking code - slight white variations for example, so you could track the paper to the selling shop.

Unfortunately, it might not even be necessary to mark the sheets of paper in order to be able to track them: https://citp.princeton.edu/research/paper/

Then the question will start to be, where to house all the criminals? Because if it's trivial to catch most criminals, but impossible to discourage every idiot who can't resist or doesn't understand they're being tracked, someone's going to be on the hook for detaining or deterring them surely?

> I've never heard of a retail store recording the serial number of all their merchandise, much less associating it with a customer's credit card.

Isn't that how the caught Chelsea Manning? Serial numbers from CD-RWs. Also, the store itself doesn't need to associate it with the customer, they just need to know where those CDs were distributed, and the investigators can follow up the transaction details.

This was my first practical answer to it. Buy the printer with cash, from a garage sale not too close to your house. Only ever use it on an airgapped computer, just to be paranoid.

In those "most cases" when it's not blocked from doing so by your firewall.

If you were paranoid enough to pay cash for a printer somewhere far from home because of the tracking issue, you will probably block it from sending messages outside of your LAN.