I spoke about issues over Chinese printer security with eight attendees at ITEX 2019 in Las Vegas. Two had no opinion on the matter, three more really didn’t believe it could happen and brushed it off. The thought of foreign powers using advanced chip technology embedded in print devices to capture and retrieve data did strike a nerve with the other three. Today we live in a connected world where many devices are capturing data on almost everything we do.

I kept pressing with the reminder of a spying incident in the United States with copy machines back in the early sixties. I believe it was 1962 at the height of the Cold War. The CIA was looking for ways to infiltrate the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. It was noted there was one person that could come and go with ease at the Soviet embassy. That person was the copy machine repairman. The CIA then worked with Xerox to develop a camera that would be placed inside the copier and take pictures of every document that was copied. Thus, the Xerox copier repairman was trained to install the camera, the film and also the removal. I believe this was the first time a print device was used to spy on a foreign country.