Do you know how they got Reality Winner? The story itself can be found here. Winner’s case is an interesting one, for me it was the moment that I remember at the learning about the printer microdots that were used to track leaked information to the office where she worked. At the time I thought about how weird it was that some laser jet printers mark your copies and prints with those that reveals the IP and printer id. Later, I circled back around and learned that nearly all of the laser jet and many of the ink jet printers are doing the same thing. {The EFF has a list](https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots) that rounds up both their own and other research about printers that produce these dots.

In the past reform and revolution relied on printers¡ often utilizing the anonymity of text to communicate their ideas and move the public. Today our printers track us! The technology of the past relied both on machines (the press) and skilled laborers. These presses have moved archieves and museums. While printer as a profession still exists, print shops have slowly been consolidated, and many have off shored their printing to parts of the globe with cheaper labor. Presses are no longer common, and the knowledge to recreate th while available is obscure. My hope is that this project will fix that.

Beyond the potential need for and right to anonymous printing, a printing press connects you to a tradition that goes back to the 1639 and Stephen Daye. Daye was the first printer in the British colonies in America. The printing presses in these colonies would go on to debate and agitate for a recognition of rights that would lead to our separation form Britain. The would enshrine these wrote on paper with our constitution printed upon them. Until the invention of rebroadcasts cast media and the internet, they united Americans as a people across a vast continent, and literally made our histories.