Many businesses and government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense, are playing a fast game of catch-up to plug a major potential source of identity theft -- high-speed copiers and fax machines that store an image of every document or photograph sent through them. Copier security has been overlooked for years 'because people have always looked at that as a piece of office furniture. They don't think of it as a data storage device,' said Bryan Fite, a Dayton-based digital security consultant. Fite is working with the Xerox Corp. on establishing guidelines for businesses that want to protect their information. High-end office machines since 2002 have come equipped with hard drives that store images of everything they copy, scan or fax in order to speed transmission and allow manipulation of images, Fite said. Only since 2007 have some manufacturers added software that can wipe clean the data before the machine is sold or warehoused. CBS news first brought the security risk to public attention in April, when it aired a segment showing how easily hard drives can be removed from old copiers and sensitive data extracted using free software available on the Internet. Fite said consumers also should be wary of documents they take to copying centers. Ask the manager how the company handles copier security, he said. With memory chips getting smaller and cheaper all the time, even hand-held electronic devices, such as PDAs and smart phones, may contain valuable data and personal information that must be thoroughly erased before selling or disposing of those items safely, digital security experts warn. Using free software easily obtainable from the Internet, a consultant featured in the CBS report was able to download thousands of documents from the hard drives of four old copiers purchased from a New Jersey warehouse. Among the pilfered documents were police complaints and suspect lists, medical records and pay stubs with names, addresses and Social Security numbers. It's just a matter of time before home copiers and fax machines also contain hard drives for storing large amounts of data rather than a simple memory that erases itself with every use, said Fite, a digital security consultant for British Telecom and several large employers in the region. 'With such cheap memory, you don't have to design an efficient machine' that cleans itself with each use, Fite said. The U.S. Department of Defense, one of the largest users of electronic devices in the world, is just now formulating a security policy for selling or disposing of its copiers, fax machines and other data-storage devices that handle nonclassified, personal information, said Ken MacNevin, a spokesman for the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service in Battle Creek, Mich. With the Pentagon playing catch-up, officials there want to make sure the guidelines are broad enough to include 'the huge range of things out there now that present us with challenges -- smart media and all the things that can take photographs, like cell phones,' MacNevin said. When safeguarding their data, businesses and organizations too often forget about their office copiers and fax machines, especially if the machines are leased. 'Then it becomes somebody else's problem,' Fite said. Contract language should be clear about erasing or securing the stored data before the machines are returned to the leasor, said local attorney Steve Justice, who heads the electronic discovery committee for the firm of Taft Stettinius & Hollister. Justice said security and privacy issues surround a growing number of electronic devices in today's offices, from large computer networks to tiny thumb drives. All electronically processed information -- including e-mails, documents and text messages -- are imbedded with hundreds of fields of 'metadata' about their origin and handling. Under federal and state laws passed in 2006 and 2008 respectively, that metadata is now a required part of any court case, Justice said. 'A lot of companies are really struggling with this right now,' he said. 'It has added a whole other layer of expenses to litigation.' Jim DeBrosse writes for the Dayton Daily News. E-mail: jdebrosse@DaytonDailyNews.com. 