GUEST BLOG: Seeby Woodhouse – Your printer is a snitch

Have you ever tried to print a black-and-white document only to be blocked because your printer says that it’s out of yellow ink? Did you think that was just a glitch?
Nope. That’s actually government surveillance.

Your printer isn’t just out of ink, It’s out of spy fluid!

Invisible Dots That Track You

Modern color laser printers embed microscopic yellow dots on every single page you print. You can’t see them with the naked eye — they require a blue LED light or microscope — but they’re there. In a tight, almost invisible grid, much like a QR code.

And they’re not just random dots.
They encode:

• Your printer’s make and model
• Its serial number
• The exact date and time the document was printed

Basically, you’re printing your digital fingerprint onto every sheet.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s confirmed by:

• EFF Research (including public whistleblowing)
• CIA and NSA leaks
• Mainstream media reports

Who Made This a Thing?

The U.S. Secret Service, back in the 1990s. Fearing a rise in counterfeit money due to the new availability of cheap, high quality colour laser, and ink jet printers – they didn’t legislate or warn the public. Instead, they cut backroom deals with major printer manufacturers — HP, Canon, Epson, Xerox — to silently embed tracking tech in every consumer printer.

The deal was simple:
If it can’t track, it can’t be sold.

That’s why you’ve never seen a truly “anonymous” printer brand – they’re not allowed to operate.

“I Only Use a Black and White Printer. I’m Safe, Right?”

Monochrome printers snitch too — just differently:

• They embed toner tracking patterns
• Store metadata in headers
• Keep job logs, even when offline
• Log your Wi-Fi connection history
• And some even use non-volatile memory to retain job history, activated the moment you plug them back in

They may not print yellow dots, but they’re still writing your name in invisible ink, and often sending job metadata to the NSA.

How They Caught “Reality Winner”

This isn’t hypothetical. In 2017, the NSA caught whistleblower “Reality Winner” — not by intercepting her email or phone calls — but through the printer dots on the leaked documents.

The paper itself gave her away.
No warrant needed.
Just a laser printer doing what it was built to do.

Who Cares?

Obviously most of us don’t need to worry about this. Like the saying goes, if you’ve got nothing to hide, then you’ve got nothing to fear, right?

If you’re not engaged in any illegal activity, nor counterfeiting money, then in all likelihood this is irrelevant to you.

But what if in the near future it became illegal to protest?

What if you live in a country like the UK, where the Internet is already so tightly monitored, that very soon the only way to organise a protest against the government might be the old “word of mouth” + flyers way.

If you ever happen to be in a situation where you want to print out a protest flyer and stick it to a lamp post, perhaps think back to this article and don’t forget that….your printer is a snitch!

Seeby Woodhouse is a NZ tech entrepreneur, CEO of Voyager and posts on Substack.