Re: Magic Lantern - The FBI's viral key-logger

From: Phil Osborn (philosborn@altavista.com)
Date: Sat Jan 05 2002 - 16:22:01 MST


On Wed Jan 02 2002 - 23:03:27 MST, Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com) wrote

>We should be tremendously up in arms against this. The FBI is basically shredding the Constitution and acting as an outlaw organization. They are able to break and enter any machine they wish and steal encryption keys despite the fact we as a nation decided that privately available encryption without government escrow was more in our interest.
>

I suspect that this is just the tip of the iceberg. "Law enforcement" breaks that law in the U.S. whenever it pleases, for the most part, and why not? All the various cop shows and movies show the cops violating the rights of the various "perps," always portrayed as vicious scum bags, in order to make the bust. We're supposed to applaud this in the name of all that's good and true. Right?

The only real thing holding them back is the need to validate a trail of evidence. Thus, they have to be careful not to violate the perp's rights along some critical path that they can bring into a courtroom (unless of course it's one of those new anti-terrorist courtrooms, where just about anything goes).

How do you know that the browser you use isn't already spying on you? The source for the Netscape browsers has been out there for some time. Have you decompiled your browser to check for back doors? I would be amazed if there weren't trojan browsers out there, waiting for the right signature to tell them to start sending everything to whereever.

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