Obama signed the fiscal cliff bill using an autopen because he was vacationing in Hawaii. Brian Resnick notes that handwriting-copying devices date back to Thomas Jefferson's era and reports that, understandably, the technology behind reproducing the signature of the commander-in-chief is locked up:
The White House treats the presidential autopen's security with the secrecy you might expect for the most powerful signature in the world. "I always heard the autopen was the second-most guarded thing in the White House after the president," Jack Shock, Bill Clinton's director of presidential letters and messages told the Associated Press in 2011. When the AP pressed the matter to the executive branch, the White House "declined to provide any further details about how many autopens the administration uses, what they look like, where they're kept, or who makes the machine."
(Photo: The Autopen Model 50 from the International Autopen Company. According to Wikipedia, the device "was used extensively by John F. Kennedy's White House to duplicate his signature." By Benjamin Olding, International Autopen Company, via Wikimedia Commons.)
The Dish 
