Asking printer manufacturers to stop spying results in Secret Service visit?

The fact that color printers print a pattern of yellow dots on all pages that indicate which printer was used, for the purposes of being able to track the identity of who has printed any page, has been known since the EFF decrypted the codes and publicized the information in 2005.

Now, however, the MIT Media Lab has started a project called "Seeing Yellow" to encourage printer owners to contact the manufacturers and complain, after it has been found that those who do so get reported to the U.S. Secret Service as subversives. (There is one known case, in which someone called to ask a printer manufacturer if there was a way to turn off the "feature.")

(Via Don Lloyd at Distributed Republic.)