Postage stamp conspiracy theory

Read the RFC! That’s just the audit trail, mentioned therein.

I was actually involved in purchasing those machines, and the software that runs them. I can promise you that there was nothing nefarious going on. We could barely get the basic functionality out of those guys; they certainly weren’t achieving any SHIELD-level information gathering. There was nothing at all in the Statement of Work to suggest a communication between the credit/debit card system and the printer.

Those credit/debit systems are highly regulated and the communications connections are completely separate from everything else going on inside the box. They do nothing else except to process your payment.

The standards are open and can be found here.