In October, President Bush signed the Patriot Act into Law. This new legislation allows for the expansion of the wiretap and surveillance liberties of our Intelligence agencies.
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"It's [Trojan Horse] back. It seems the spy dudes have finally joined the dark side and learned to hack." |
True, these are extraordinary times and such times call for extraordinary measures. I will not argue the merits of this law enacted in haste. I hope that this new law to stop terrorism will be enforced in complete fairness and that once rampant terrorism is contained, the leeway given to Intelligence gatherers will not bite the ass of the honest citizen.
I will try to explain to you some of the techniques that will be used by agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Carnivore has probably gotten the most press of all the surveillance methods by the spy guys. Carnivore is used in two ways: as a "content-wiretap" and a "trap-and-trace/pen-register". It can capture all email messages to and from a specific account. It can also capture all network traffic to and from a specified IP.
Actually, for you to be surveyed by Carnivore, you have to be suspected of a crime. Proper channels such as court orders and search warrants must be issued for the FBI to tap your Internet activities through Carnivore. Carnivore is implemented through the permission of your Internet service provider. The spy dudes have to go to your ISP, show them the warrant and your ISP has to give permission for the FBI and Carnivore to track you.
While ominous sounding, Carnivore can only cull email headers and web site travel. It cannot track every keystroke you make.
Designed to track everything you type on your keyboard, a keystroke logger is a much more invasive bit of technology. It can literally scour your computer and Internet activities word by word. If you express thoughts of murdering your boss, the key logger will have your exact quotation in its database.
Like Carnivore, a warrant must be issued against you for a key logger to be used to monitor your Internet activities. Unlike Carnivore, a key logger has to be physically installed on your computer. That means if you are being tracked in this way, you were bad enough for the courts to issue the kind of warrant where agents can enter your house and install the tiny key-logging device inside your machine.
Of course, a key logger becomes useless if the recipient finds it on their machine and removes it. Many people simply use their machines and never crack open the hood, but a true comp-lover knows every card in every bus. This has occurred to the Intelligence community and that is why their newest tool in "The War on Terrorism" is an old favorite of hackers and script kiddies.
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It's back. It seems the spy dudes have finally joined the dark side and learned to hack.
It was recently announced that the FBI will start to use the old Trojan horse virus to cyber spy on bad guys. The Trojan (if you remember) can invade your computer and log every keystroke you make. It can get your passwords plus the entirety of your emails.
It can be sent through to you through email and even embedded in a web bug. The FBI is calling the technology "Magic Lantern". Many coding gurus condemn the Magic Lantern approach taken by the Intelligence community because Trojan Horses are ancient technology in the hacker's universe.
Civil libertarians find all of these Internet surveillance methods grossly intrusive and easy to abuse. While there is a moratorium on elements of The Patriot Act that will come to an end in 2006, these three do not fall under that moratorium. I said before in this article I would not argue the merits of such surveillance and I won't. Not in this article at least.
Yes, there will be terrible abuse of these new surveillance laws and we will probably have quite a battle in the future getting them off the books. The unfortunate nature of terrorism lends itself to untried methods. Terrorists will figure out how to evade detection from Internet surveillance just like they found the holes in our airport security.
You on the other hand are an Internet savvy, computer genius. You know when hackers are lurking around your firewall. You know not to open that email attachment on your computer. You will recognize a little bit of new hardware inside your machine. Do not panic. Not yet, at least.