School of Applied Technology's 鈥婦irector of Information Technology Louis McHugh is quoted in "The Atlantic"
"The Article - The Mysterious Printer Code That Could Have Led the FBI to Reality Winner"
Many color printers embed grids of dots that allow law enforcement to track every document they output.
The FBI filed a criminal complaint against , an NSA contractor, who the agency alleges stole classified documents and shared them with an 鈥渙nline news outlet鈥 believed to be The Intercept. Because the documents in question appear to have been printed, some security experts have been wondering if a mysterious code used by some printers is to blame for Winner鈥檚 capture. That code is an almost-invisible grid of dots that some color printers ink into every document they print.
According to a research team at the Illinois Institute of Technology that worked on , some printer manufacturers don鈥檛 even acknowledge that they exist or provide any information about how they work. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a trivial way of tracking,鈥 said Louis McHugh, one of the IIT researchers. 鈥淭here鈥檚 nothing high-tech about it.鈥
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