I hate to be the grinch but that email about bar codes has been circulating around the internet for several years now and is mostly wrong.
 
1)  There are actually several different barcode-issuing agencies.  Some include country-code logic, others don't.
2)  Of the ones that do, not all use the same codes.
3)  Having said that, the biggest two (UPC-A and EAN) do use the country codes listed BUT they only tell you the country of registration of the bar code itself.  They do not necessarily tell you anything about the country of origin of the product.  As the snopes.com article notes, a company with a headquarters in South Africa will have all its products coded with a leading 600 even though the products were manufactured in England.  A Chinese company with a US subsidiary could buy a block of bar codes under either legal entity and use them interchangably.
 
The country codes are used only as an administrative technique so the subsidiaries of the barcode-issuing company can sell codes with less risk of creating duplicates.  While you might assume that a US-issued code implies a US-made product, the bar code is not proof.

Mike Rossander
www.rossander.org/infosec

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